#the freddie shit and all the pillaging have got nothing on this | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

yessoupy · 5 years

Text

here, have some random-ass MLB zombie apocalypse shit i wrote in 2011 and will never finish. zito and lincecum, as ever.

He's been scraping by for months. He's amazed he's made it this far unscathed. Pillaging the pharmacy the week before had literally saved his skin; the rash that had started on his hands had become infected and had threatened to shut down his already taxed immune system.

So now, as healthy as he thinks he'll ever be, he huddles by his shopping cart (with working wheels, he'd taken the time to be picky) loaded with valuable medical supplies and facing down his death. The marauders are a dozen strong and he's a lone wolf, until now self-sufficient and capable.

Now, cornered. He knows they only want his supplies. But without them, he may as well be dead. He won't last a day without something to use to barter, without being able to tend to cuts and scrapes. He considers offering up the only thing he'd been able to salvage before the apocalypse struck – a survival guide printed off the Internet.

He's read it cover-to-cover a dozen times, has everything memorized anyway, but he thinks these guys probably have no use for instructions on how to build a windmill.

His hands are inching up over his head in reluctant surrender when the gunshots sound. He is stuck between covering his head with his hands and clutching his cart closer to him. He does both, one arm protecting his skull and the other hand catching itself in the hard red plastic.

After a period of time passes – during which he fingers the cheap rosary around his neck, praying for each plastic bead – the guns stop firing and he realizes he's been left unharmed. He forces his hands to disengage from their dedicated tasks and creeps them up over his head.

“Please don't kill me!” He's not above a little begging, four months into the apocalypse and without anyone or thing familiar.

“Wasn't planning on it, Timmy.”

He jerks his head toward the voice, familiar in a way he hasn't let himself think about since abandoning his condo in Seattle, since burying his dog in a forest with tears streaming down his face, since walking into his father's home and being greeted with nothing but rot. “Where are you?” He doesn't see anyone down the alley.

Then, out of the darkness, emerge three figures. Two are completely unfamiliar, only friendly in the way they move fluidly and not like the jerking undead masses plaguing the continent. The third has a stride old to his memory, shelved with his condo and his dog and his father.

“Barry?”

–

They have a colony going, it turns out. Of all of them, Tim didn't expect Barry to be the one leading a refugee settlement. They've taken over a library, an interesting choice, and while Tim isn't exactly sure it's the most strategic of locations, he can understand the romantic line of thinking which led Barry to surround himself with a now-dead civilization's literature.

It becomes decreasingly odd to refer to the life he had four months ago as one of a lost time. The walk from the dead marauders to the library was quiet, covert, and zombie-free. He's having trouble believing that he's here now, seated on an honest-to-god couch, clutching a plastic cup of actually clean water in his hands. Barry is next to him, but an arm’s length away. Tim is confused. Shouldn’t this kind of reunion be more … exuberant?

But maybe Barry’s moved on.

“We haven't seen any live ones for weeks, Timmy, you're a revelation. I mean, besides those pirates. But they don't count. They're less than human in the soul.”

He wants to ask how many dead ones they've seen, if the count has decreased down here, or if it's just as plagued as Oregon. Instead, he sips at the water, unable to break months of conditioning that required him to cherish every drop of water that came his way.

“It's okay, Timmy. We have plenty where that came from. Hydrate. Take a nap if you need to, then we'll get to negotiations.”

Tim is startled. “Negotiations?”

“For your medical supplies.”

“I don't understand.”

“We want to negotiate with you and your people for some of your supplies in return for whatever it is we can offer.”

“My people?” Tim is confused, operating under the assumption that he'd just found his people.

Barry stares at him. “Yeah, you and your group.” Like this was some ordinary thing, negotiations and roaming groups of people trading for goods. Tim thinks that maybe it is, that maybe that's how things have worked out for the rest of the continent, that he's just been missing out on the camaraderie and something resembling life from Before.

He shakes his head. “I'm by myself, Barry.”

Barry's eyes go wide. “What?”

“I've been by myself this whole time.”

There's a beat of still and silence before Tim finds himself wrapped up in Barry's arms, unable to save his cup of water from falling to the tile. He doesn't hesitate in bringing his arms up around Barry in reciprocation. “Z?” Tim asks in confusion, hands clutched in his heavy shirt. His throat gets tight and his eyes burn, and he's forgotten what it's like to get choked up. This is the kind of welcome he’d been expecting since he saw Barry’s figure in the alley. He feels like he's dying.

“It's been awhile since you've been touched, and it's important. Very important. With things so unpredictable out here, you have to keep the mind level. Twenty seconds of skin-to-skin contact on a good day, Timmy. That's what you need to feel human. In days like these, we should all hold hands.”

As Barry's hands move up Tim's bare arms, he gets the impression that Barry's given this speech before, that he's one in a long line of refugees who've stumbled upon Barry's colony and into his unique way of seeing things in the face of disaster. “How many of you are there?”

Letting loose that goofy grin he'd had in Oakland, Barry squeezes Tim's shoulders and releases him. “Only one of me, baby.”

Tim scowls. “You know what I mean.”

“Today, with you, ten.”

“Have you found anyone?”

A pained expression flits across Barry's face and Tim regrets asking. Barry shakes his head. “Just you.”

“Do you know about anyone else?”

Barry schools his features into detached blankness. “Heard from Buster before the grids went down; he was in Georgia. You know what happened to Georgia.” Barry isn't asking, and Tim does know. Word travels well among the survivors. “Cainer, I'm sure he's fine. He's got guns, the survival instinct. Jonny'd left for San Juan, he might be alright on an island.”

He knows from Barry’s voice and the look on his face that he shouldn’t ask any more questions about Before, but he can’t help it. He wants to know. “Madison? Freddy? Cody? Vogey? Anyone from Oakland?”

The last remaining light in Barry’s eyes flares out. “Timmy, it's better that we not talk about who and what we don't have.”

This is the kind of advice he'd rather not have to take.

–

They all work, have jobs. Their compound works like a well-oiled machine, and they even have a few of those, too. Tim proffers his survival guide as some kind of offering besides his medical store, but nothing in it is anything new to those who live in a library. They assure him that the medications, the pharmacy he's been hauling around with him, those things are enough.

He tries to help: picking up a shovel when he sees someone else digging, grabbing a bucket when he sees someone going for water, answering the hail for an extra set of hands whenever he hears it. Most of the time, though, he's gently told that he's more hurt than help, to go rest, comb the stacks for a book about this or that.

Angry, hurt, and feeling emasculated when Sally firmly tells him No, I don't need your help building this generator, Tim seeks out Barry.

“They don't let me help,” he says, trying not to whine but failing miserably. “I try, and I want to, but they send me away.”

“You need your rest, Timmy,” Barry says easily, eyes locked on the task before him on the main circulation desk.

“I've been resting for days. It's more than that. They don't trust me, Barry.”

“What?”

“If they don't trust me to dig a hole for a latrine, how am I supposed to live here? How can I be safe when we're attacked?”

“You dig a trench for a latrine, Lincecum,” says Anthony, walking through the workspace, his arms loaded down with pilfered supplies from the junkyard down the street.

Frowning at the mechanic's receding back, Tim points. “See what I mean?”

“Well, he's right about that, Tim.” Barry finally raises his eyes and Tim sees a deep sadness in them that flickers away in a flash. “What did you do before?”

“Before? Barry, you know --”

“No, I mean before you found us. How did you survive?”

Tim shrugs, mildly embarrassed. “I just … did. I had that guide, I lived by it.”

“You found no one else? You didn't spend time with any other groups?”

“No! I told you --”

“It's just that they find that hard to believe.” Barry raises an eyebrow at him and turns his gaze back to his work.

“Barry, I don't understand.”

“They think you're a spy.”

Tim can't help but laugh out loud. “A spy? For who? The zombies?”

Barry shakes his head and Tim can sense his impatience. “No, for the pirates, or the government, even. It's too neat, how you showed up on our doorstep with those supplies.”

“It sounds like you count yourself among them,” Tim says defensively. “You know me, Barry.”

Barry attaches a panel to the piece of machinery he's been working on this whole time and Tim suddenly realizes what it is: a window-unit air conditioner. “Tell me how you got here.”

A chill works itself from his heart out to his limbs. Flashes of his living nightmare take over his vision and he shakes his head vigorously. “No.”

“Why not?”

“I don't want to relive it,” he bites out.

Barry makes one last round with the screwdriver along the edges of the panel, tightening each screw. “I believe you, Tim,” he clarifies, looking up again. “I was so happy to see you, but ever since Casper ….”

“Everyone keeps whispering about him when they think I can't hear. Who was he?”

“Casper was my partner.”

Tim blinks. “And they got him.”

Barry nods, that sadness crossing his face. “Want to help me install this in the back room where we put those batteries this morning?”

“Yeah, sure. I'd like that.”

“I’ll talk to them,” Barry promises.

#my fic #abandoned and discontinued #lmao #why would he be spying #why would anyone even think that #oh well i guess i was just seeing the farm #this is late october 2011 #yep season 2 #so it's weird this just came to my mind #i don't think i've opened that doc since i wrote that #but watching the front half of s2 it popped into my brain #funny how that works

0 notes