When Harry 'died' after the green jet of light from Voldemort's wand hit him in the middle of the forest - he didn't wake up in a white wonderland that morphed into his childhood train station nor his wisest mentor, instead...
The taste of dirt greeted his senses long before anything else did. Bitter, watery and oddly shaped, he felt the buds and brambles in his mouth, his nose shoved into the earth and saw the tiny clumps line the inside of his glasses where it appeared as if he was pushed face-first into the ground.
He quickly drew his head, gasping for fresh air. The larger chunks of forest debris fell out of his lips but a few smaller pieces of dirt landed in his mouth. He could feel the faint trickles of dirt falling of his cheeks, the sides of his glasses. He quickly gathered saliva and spat the remaining dirt out, taking of his glasses and scrubbing at them. "Uh, fuck," he swore because he was a 17 year old boy and who didn't fucking swear at that age? Then, he put on his glasses again and glanced around.
"Blimey," he muttered. He was in a forest with very tall trees. Their bases broke of into 3-4 roots just from the side Harry was able to see looking at the trees in view, dispersing about half a yard from the base of the tree before knitting into the ground, with ferns, fungi and mushrooms dotting the spaces in between. The roots gathered into the trunk of the tree roughly half a yard up from the ground as well, the overall trunk was perhaps a yard and a bit wide at the diameter, and the height of the trunk of the tree stretched easily ten or fifteen yards into the sky. Impossible to climb as there were no branches to grip - the branches didn't start until that high up, and the trunk was simply too wide to wrap one's arm around.
They were very unfriendly trees. Unclimbable. The bark was light brown and very thick looking. Harry wasn't even sure it was possible to sink a hook into them or anything, something which had been shown on the video of the climbing gym he once went to for a classmate's 7th birthday party. He had never been invited to any birthday parties because he had never any friends but two years, the 7th and 9th, classmates took pity on him and invited the entire class. The Dursleys only let him go because it meant he would be out of the house for the day.
The lowest branches stretched for about two to three yards across, and then Harry guessed they got smaller all the way up. Majority of the canopy looked like the trees were a mix of pine and deciduous with many branches all around.
It was pointless to think about climbing them when he had no way to get up in the first place.
Glancing around some more, and trying to see where the light came from (it looked near dusk, but there was light coming in through the branches at all angles, like was a sun in all directions...), his eyes eventually spotted a wooden table, roughly waist-height, with two small objects on them.
He reached for his wand, but when he took it out of his back pocket, he had a bad feeling about it. When he tried to lumos the objects to him, nothing happened. Was magic dead in this place?
Upon approaching the table by foot, he spied what looked like 2 pills. A red one, and a blue one, with little else on the table.
He paused. Although he had never been in this situation before, a tiny voice inside his head told him he had to take one. It was the only way out of this...whatever this was. He had a feeling it was limbo of a sort and he would find out his situation later.
The red one looked ominous. It looked evil. Truly vile. A demonic red that seemed to glow from within even though Harry knew it was merely reflecting the light from around. But yet there was a slight feeling of comfort at it. It looked real, raw, like a pill he could actually imagine taking, choking on it momentarily, but feeling better after it went down and like it was how medicine should be. The blue one looked eerily calm to see. It was the most beautiful blue, like the waters of a cruise ship from when the Dursleys went on a cruise during the Christmas Holidays of his first year at Hogwarts and kept the pictures in the living room. The pill looked delicious, like fondant of a cake, but yet it also looked too good to be true. Like his stomach would revolt because it was too sweet or something.
He paused. Which one to take?
There was a tap on his shoulder from a hand he couldn't see in the dark of the gloom in the forest. Panicking and with shaky hands, he took one, and waited for the effects to occur.
Author's Note: I'm gonna do a bit of explaining cause I don't think the summary does it justice. This is an AU that doesn't focus on any of the events from canon at all. They're worked into the story, but only as a background and you can read this story fandom blind. This story is really a zombie apocalypse, dystopia, survivalist story with no magic (it's worked into the story but only as a background) and mostly relies on muggle weapons to defeat the zombies. The only thing it shares from Harry Potter is the characters but they're not the focus of the story either. I wanted to write a zombie apocalypse fanfiction for a long time, but with HP characters cause I'm more familiar with them.