Title: A Surrendered Life
Rating: PG-13
Fandom: Criminal Minds
Universe: Zombie Cantos
Characters/Pairing: Elizabeth Prentiss - gen
Genre: Horror/Drama
Summary: It's hard to deal with the fact that the world has gone to hell. Sometimes all you can do is fight back.

…

I am not dreaming
Of a hope-victory-life.
I am just dreaming
Of a hope-survival-life.
Yesterday my need was world-conquest.
I failed.
Today my need is my own survival.
I am failing.
Tomorrow my need will be a surrendered life.
I shall fail.

Survival – Sri Chinmoy

.

Coming home from very lonely places, all of us go a little mad: whether from great personal success, or just an all-night drive, we are the sole survivors of a world no one else has ever seen.

John le Carre

...

The Day of the Zombie Apocalypse

A politician's greatest tool is information.

With information, you can win wars, bring down opponents. With information, you can make a name for yourself. The thought of an event where nobody has any information at all is unnatural, almost terrifying.

At first there are rumors, which is how information starts, so everyone keeps their ear to the keyhole, waiting to see what comes. What comes, in this case, is a dozen different stories, none of which have any corroboration at all.

A voodoo priest casts a curse, a diseased animal goes through the slaughterhouse. Whatever the reason, whatever the cause, nobody has seen anything like it before.

Distracted by a terse situation that needs her strict attention, Elizabeth Prentiss is uninterested in anything less important than a full-scale global disaster. It's only when she hears the flights in and out of the entirety of the Americas have been cancelled that the seriousness of the situation strikes home.

'What's going on?' she demands of the nearest person she finds – he's a secretary of some variety with a cheap tie and a shocked expression. If anything, his face contorts into sheer terror at her words. He almost crumbles to dust under her gaze.

Elizabeth Prentiss is not a person to be trifled with.

'They say the dead are walking,' he tells her, eyes cast downwards. 'I don't…they're not telling me anything. I'm sorry.' He rushes off in the opposite direction, leaving her no more enlightened than she had been before his revelation.

"The dead are walking." Really. He might as well have said that there were moon-men landing on the White House lawn, for all the incredulity it instills. She goes in search of someone a little more trustworthy. The problem with politicians, though, is that none of them are particularly trustworthy. There's some kind of irony in that.

All the phone calls she tries to make are unsuccessful; a disconnected line, or a busy signal. Finally – finally – she manages to get a call through to a contact in the Pentagon, who tells her exactly the same thing that the secretary had, which is more than a little disconcerting.

'What can be done about this?' she asks sharply.

'Everyone that can pull a trigger is fighting back, Ambassador,' he tells her, which is probably something of an overstatement. 'The infection is moving fast – faster than anything we've seen.'

As it turns out, her phone call beats the official statement by about half an hour, and the emergency meeting by an hour and a half.

In terms of importance, the American Embassy in Ukraine isn't top of the list. It's been almost thirty years since the end of the Cold War, and international relations are more focused on the Middle East. That's not to say it's gone and forgotten, though.

There are a mixture of people packed together in the conference room; foreign dignitaries, and soldiers, and a lot of people that Elizabeth doesn't recognize. Some of them will be from other embassies; it's not just the United States that this is affecting. She mentally kicks herself for not paying enough attention – she's tried to call Emily almost a dozen times now. Defeat isn't easy to accept when you're not used to losing.

There's a map on the screen, a white dot representing the start of the infection. Patient zero. More than a third of the continental U.S as well as most of Central America is marred by a red stain. A blood stain. Those are the infected areas. There's a second stain – an orange one this time, that spreads up into Canada and down into South America – a 24-hour extrapolation.

It's not an epidemic. That word doesn't seem powerful enough to describe what's going on. This is like an epidemic on crack. Spinning out of control before anyone knows what's going on or how to stop it.

'The infection has been contained within the continent,' the speaker at the front of the room informs them. 'Any cases that made it out of the country have been dealt with.' Elizabeth Prentiss has been a politician long enough to know what "dealt with" means, and it's usually a bullet to the head, rather than a quarantine facility.

She's hyperaware of the fact that Washington D.C. is included in the infected zone, and that chances are, Emily is already dead. Still, there's still some hope – if the infection is only spread by bodily fluids, as the rumor mill tells her, then there's the slightest possibility that her daughter is still alive.

Politicians don't deal in hope, no matter what campaign messages tell the general public. They deal in numbers, in statistics. For the most part, they're cynical realists, not idealists. Idealists tend to get themselves eaten alive, zombie pun not intended.

There are a multitude of questions once the speaker has finished, ranging from "What are we going to do about this?" to "How will this affect the exchange rate of the greenback?"

"Nothing" is the answer to the first question, or at least that's what it seems like he's saying. Maybe a more realistic evaluation would be "not much." Several government agencies are still holding out, and apparently they're the ones who are taking care of things like finding out just what the hell is going on, and how they're supposed to stop it. It's good news, in a way – it means there's an avenue of communication to find out where her daughter is.

In the end, it takes three phone calls and a lot of yelling to find out that Emily had been on a case when everything had gone down. There's a lot of database corruption, and a lack of electricity over there, though, which means exactly where this case had been is as much as a mystery as anything else.

The moment she finds out where the task force is being set up, she requests the transfer out of the Ukraine. It's signed off on almost immediately, which is a testament to just how dire the situation is. She packs her bags and gets on the small, crowded jet that's been provided for them. All these people volunteering in the fact against the enemy that they don't really know anything about.

All they really know is that there's work to be done.