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soooo fanfiction.
so I dithered forever over posting this but ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
countersparking said I should, so ... yeah ...
It does not have a title yet because I suck at those and it's not like I'm, idk, posting this around to comms or anything.
Anyway, this is the first part of probably several of what I guess is probably best summed up as an AU Young Avengers zombie roadtrip, it is about 3600 words, and it contains mild zombies and some nerdery that will make you want to slap me.
The bike has pros and cons.
Billy's gone over them in his head over and over while pedalling breathlessly through stretches of abandoned suburbia, just for something to think of besides how he's probably going to die.
Cons first: it's not as quiet as he'd like it to be, it's harder to maneuver over ... debris, and if he falls while he's trying to make an escape, he's screwed.
Pros: it's faster than running would be.
Unfortunately, the fact that there are so many cons usually just steers him back to the fact that he's probably going to die, but the one pro is a pretty big pro. Faster than running means faster than basically anything that wants to kill him, and he is totally willing to sacrifice silence, which he's never been all that good at anyway, and the potential risk of his wheels slipping in something he'd prefer not to think about and him crashing to an early death, in exchange for being faster than things that want to kill him. He's gotten better at watching where he's going, anyway.
Still, right now he's thinking about how he's probably going to die. He doesn't even know where he is any more, somewhere in New Jersey, still suburbs, and it's quiet.
Too quiet.
That doesn't really mean anything, because it's always too quiet. Just him and the tickticktickticktick of his bike, and whenever anything hears it or sees him moving he pedals faster until it's gone.
And it's worked okay for him so far. It's not that often he has to beat anything off with the big heavy stick he keeps in his backpack along with all the tins he could cram in there after – when he left – the ones he's rationing carefully, and rationing them carefully means he doesn't have to venture into anywhere potentially unsafe to look for food just yet.
Which is great. Billy is 100% for not venturing into potentially unsafe places.
Sure, everything is a potentially unsafe place now, but potentially unsafe open spaces are way better than potentially unsafe enclosed spaces when your main method of coping with what makes the spaces potentially unsafe is to jump on your bicycle and try to get away from it as fast as possible.
And you can't ride a bicycle indoors.
"... Professor Oak says, there's a time for everything," he mutters grimly, scanning the empty street ahead for anything shambling and lurchy. "But not now."
*
He sleeps squashed up against a dumpster with the bike pulled in front of him like a shield. Or ... a cage, if he wants to get metaphory, which he doesn't. He's surrounded by empty houses full of empty beds he could be using, but the empty houses freak him out too much, and besides, some of them definitely have corpses in them. And only some of those corpses don't move. He'd rather be out here, where if anything moves at him he can get the hell out of there.
Sometimes this has resulted in him biking like three blocks because a cat hissed at him after dark, but seriously, better safe than sorry, and for all he knows there might be zombie cats or something.
He hopes there aren't any zombie cats around here.
It's a warm night, but he still huddles up and pulls the hood of his jacket down over his face. He's exhausted and he's ... aware of that, but he knows that if he falls into a sleep as deep as he needs, he ... won't not wake up, because if he thought that'd happen he thinks he might be willing to go for that. It's not as horrible as the idea of waking up to something bloodstained and mindless that used to be a person, gnawing his foot off. Which is probably what will happen if he lets his guard down, if he's not ready to wake up at the slightest noise.
It's kind of a miracle he manages to sleep at all, but. You adjust.
As it turns out, the noise that wakes him up while it's still dark isn't really all that slight. His first reaction, like it is practically whenever he wakes up, is fear, but then his brain catches up enough to realize that it's the distant roar of an engine, and two things occur to him, one that makes his heart leap and one that makes it sink in terror.
The first: zombies do not drive cars, so whoever is driving that car is a person, which means there is someone alive somewhere near here and he is not alone.
The second: everything near here is going to hear that noise.
He gets to his feet and onto his bike in a quick, practiced scramble, and gets moving.
Tickticktickticktick.
He can't see too well in the dark, but he's learned that apparently it doesn't bother the undead. He just has to hope that they'll be more interested in the louder noise of the motor engine – it's getting closer by the second, though, and while he's more than willing to just follow it as fast as he can for however long it takes for him to catch up, even if that's days, he'd rather – rather get them to see him as soon as possible.
He tries not to think about what he can't quite see, not to imagine things moving in the dark, because if anything is lurking there it can't catch him, he can go faster, it's okay it's okay it's okay it's okay – still, when something groans towards him from the left he swerves a little more than he needs to and almost misses the corner he needs to turn to make it onto the road that he thinks he hears – that he hopes he hears – someone else coming this way down. He tries to drown out the too-slow sound of its footsteps behind him and focus on the engine, the glances of light he can see off trash cans and abandoned cars on the street ahead.
The car – it looks like an SUV but it's hard to tell in the dark – shoots past the end of the street while he's a few yards short of it – the light and noise are almost unreal, and he feels the wind from it on his face and thinks maybe he can see the people in it in the split second they're close enough –
Please let them see me please let them see me please let them see me, he repeats in his head as he pedals after the car, and it's only once the engine's roar isn't so close to be practically deafening that he realizes he's saying it out loud.
And they haven't seen him. Or if they have, they don't care. They don't stop or even slow down. It's not like he doesn't get why they wouldn't stop for someone – it's dark, this used to be a populated area, and Billy knows it's quiet round here, hasn't had to run away from anything for nearly two days until just now, but someone coming through here in a car, they're not gonna know that. And even if they did – maybe they just don't have room in their car. Maybe they don't have enough supplies to want to share with another person.
Or maybe they just didn't see him. He doesn't really know if that's worse – he doesn't know if he's making up excuses for people not to have stopped to make room for a guy trying to survive a zombie plague on a bicycle just because he wants so bad for someone to know he's still here that it doesn't matter if they don't even do anything about it.
It's entirely likely, he thinks. Which, yeah, would be pathetic, but he's always been kind of pathetic so what else is new?
He's not so pathetic he's just going to give up, though. He can still hear the engine ahead, still see the lights – nothing else for miles is noisy or lit up, he should be able to follow them even if he can't see them. And eventually they're going to have to stop for something – food, or gas, or – peeing or something.
"I don't take up that much room," he murmurs. "And I brought my own food, and I can leave when that runs out. Yeah." He'd be okay with even just – stopping to talk to them for a little while. Say hi. And then just ... be on his way. Wherever his way is.
The car's faster than he can pedal, but it's not as fast as it could be going. Probably because it's dark. Probably because they don't know this area. Probably because you never know when you're gonna have to slow down to make sure you don't wind up with something that wants to kill and eat you smashing through your windshield if you're not careful enough.
He just has to make sure he's paying attention to the things that want to kill him and eat him all around him as well as following the car.
No problem. He's faster than them.
The car is faster than him, and the gap between them is getting bigger with every turn of his wheels, but he'll catch up. It's a purpose, and he hasn't had one of those for a while – besides "not dying", that is.
"Catch that car or die trying" has a way better ring to it than "don't die or die trying", anyway.
*
Dawn breaks to a thinning out of houses, bigger streets, and Billy's not sure how he feels about that, so he lists the pros and cons.
Cons: The car, and he can still hear its engine far ahead, will be able to go faster, and he won't be able to keep up. And highways are full of crashed cars and dead people – all the people who weren't in the suburbs any more, who tried to get out – so, more zombies.
Pros: The car might not actually be able to go faster because of all the wrecks and zombies.
And that might not even be a pro, because if they have to stop because of zombies, the likelihood they're going to be even a bit willing to open the door for someone is basically nil.
"Fuck," Billy murmurs under his breath, but he has no other direction to go in right now. He knows what's going to happen. He's going to keep on following the car until he can't hear it any more, and then he's going to keep on following it until he's stopped imagining he can still hear it, and then he's going to find some corner to eat a tin of something and collapse and then he's going to wake up and pick up right where he left off. But he just can't bring himself to give up on this. It's the first sign of actual life he's seen ... that he's seen in a while.
He keeps going, appreciating that daylight makes it easier to see the things that make fumbling grabs for him as he weaves around them – he doesn't like looking at them, but it beats not knowing where they are.
For instance: if it was still dark, he wouldn't be able to see the one that's suddenly loomed up in front of him in time to avoid running straight into it. It's only got one arm, like the other one got caught in something and it didn't care enough to stop it being yanked off – which, sure, grisly, but that's one less hand to try and grab him. Unfortunately it's trying to make up for it with its jaws – when he swerves to one side to keep from running right into it, it makes a lunge for his right arm, and its teeth clamp onto his sleeve.
Still pedalling, he makes a sort of terrified yelp, and it gurgles a growl, blood and bile bubbling up from its throat and soaking the fabric of his jacket. Billy has never been gladder that he wears baggy clothes. He pedals as fast as he can, hoping he can shake it off or something, but it doesn't let go, just makes a one-armed flailing grab for him and succeeds in catching hold of the strap of his backpack and making him wobble distressingly. "Get off," he groans, "Get off get off get off –"
He glances back to the road ahead just in time to narrowly avoid crashing into the open door of an abandoned car – his instinct is to give it a wide berth but he makes the split second decision to keep close enough that the zombie smacks into it with a nasty, crunching thud.
This might have worked, he realizes a second later, with it still hanging off him with a vengeance, if zombies, like, felt pain or even gave a damn if you hit them with things. Stupid. He's not going to shake it off, it's going to make him crash, and then it's going to claw its way into his innards and eat them and he'll probably still be alive when it's doing that and – no, no, maybe he has half a hope if he can get his coat and backpack off while he's still moving so the zombie just rolls down the street behind him with a mouthful of sleeve and a handful of bag –
It opens its mouth to hiss at him, and he jerks his arm out of the way before it can make another go of closing its teeth on him – it tumbles backward, now just hanging on by its fingers clamped onto his bag; its legs are dragging against the road and he thinks one of them might be broken but he knows that's not going to stop it stumbling after him if he stops the bike. "Get off!" He fumbles one-handed with the straps of the bag, trying to keep the bike from capsizing. He's got one strap free of his shoulder – unfortunately, not the one that the zombie is hanging off – and he's trying to swap hands when there's the deafening crack of a gunshot and the zombie's body gives a sharp backwards jerk – if its leg wasn't broken before, it is now.
It's still holding on, but Billy forces himself to look away from it as another shot rings out – the gun's in the unsteady hands of a boy his age with short dark hair. He looks scared. It's so not a good face for someone pointing a gun in his direction that Billy barely even remembers to be glad that he's looking at another living human being – in fact he feels more terrified now than he did ten seconds ago when the only thing he had to worry about was the zombie hanging off his arm.
When their eyes meet, the other boy's widen and he yells, "Hold still!" Billy stares back at him, wondering how the hell he expects him to hold still when there is a zombie attached to his bike, when if he stops moving his legs it's probably going to sink its teeth into his ankle, and then the boy fires again. Billy winces, but, for all the worst case scenarios going through his head in that split second, the bullet doesn't hit him – the extra weight on his right side is suddenly gone, though, and with no time for Billy to compensate for the change in balance, the bike abruptly falls over sideways.
For a moment all he can do is blink at the ashphalt that his face is now unhappily close to, kind of seeing stars and not totally sure what the hell just happened. The next moment he registers that he is in pain, but it's the kind of pain he can get up from – the kind of pain he has to be able to get up from really damn quickly if he wants to go on not being dead – so he ignores his stinging palm and aching knee and starts to push himself up, on autopilot, ready to get back on the bike and get going ... except that he's being offered a hand up, the boy with the gun looking down at him with a mixture of concern and disbelief.
"Hey – are you okay?"
Billy blinks back at him. He's not entirely sure he trusts himself to form words, but he takes the boy's hand, and, with his help, stumbles free of the bike and to his feet.
A little way off, behind the boy who apparently just saved him from a really pathetic and probably kind of slapstick death-by-zombie-and-bicycle, there's a slate-grey SUV.
Billy stares at it incredulously for a second, and then lets his hands fall to his sides, and laughs.
*
Eli's shoving an armful of canned fruit into his bag when the gunshots come from outside. He exchanges just the briefest of looks with Teddy, who's on the other side of the store looking for bottled water – both of them immediately drop what they're plundering and, weapons at the ready, make a run for the door. Nate can probably take care of himself, sure, but neither of them is willing to take a chance on that.
Fortunately, the car's not surrounded by a sudden horde of zombies when they get out there, it's just Nate and one other figure – Eli takes aim on a reflex, but Teddy's hand on the muzzle of his gun dissuades him.
"Hey, wait, hang on. It's not ..."
Eli doesn't really need to be told – he can see, now, that it's not a zombie, it's a skinny kid who is apparently completely alive, going from the fact that he's talking to Nate and Nate's not shooting him in the face or locking himself in the car.
"Where the hell did he come from?" Eli wonders aloud as Nate waves and beckons them over.
"Did you find anything?" Nate asks as the two of them reach the road.
"Yeah," says Teddy, "but we came out here as soon as we heard ..."
The new guy winces a little and glances over his shoulder. "Yeah. Sorry."
Eli looks at Nate, raising an eyebrow. "Were you shooting at him?"
"No," Nate starts, but the new guy interrupts him.
"I was – coming up the road and there was a, a – it was hanging off my bike and –"
"Your bike –?" There is indeed a bicycle lying sadly on its side a little way down the road. About a foot from it is a one-armed corpse, a woman with short blonde hair, bloody and motionless. Eli looks away quickly, back to the owner of the bicycle. "You biked out here? From where?"
"Manhattan. I don't know how far it is, it's been – ... I don't know."
He looks at the ground, and Eli stares at him. He's filthy, and he looks exhausted and half-starved. There's something that looks like a sturdy length of wood sticking out of his backpack, but apart from that he's not even armed. Eli's professional opinion, where professional here means he has been shooting zombies out of an SUV for about a week and a half, is that there is no way this guy should be alive – and judging by the look on Teddy's face, and Nate's, he's not alone there. Eli's about to ask how the hell that is even possible, but Teddy cuts in first, his voice a lot gentler than Eli knows he would have been. "Where are you headed?"
Bicycle kid looks up as though startled, and shakes his head. "I ... I don't know. Away." He stares at the three of them. "What - what about you?"
Teddy looks at Nate with a tired smile, and Eli, knowing what's coming, lifts his eyes briefly heavenward. "We're going to New Mexico," Nate says. "It's kind of a long story, but ... you wanna come with us?"
Bicycle kid doesn't really look like he's even really taking this in, but his face starts to break into a grin and he replies breathlessly, "Yeah – I mean, sure. Okay."
Nate nods, smiling a faintly relieved little smile even though, seriously, what did he expect – for the guy to be like no thanks, I'm going to stick with my rickety bicycle? "We'd better get in the car," he says with a wary glance at the grisly corpse. "I'm Nate – this is Eli, and Teddy." He has to look at bicycle kid expectantly for a couple of seconds before he seems to catch on that this is where he offers his own name.
"Billy."
Eli offers a hand for him to shake, which Billy takes, his own grip unsteady. "We probably oughtta go pick up all the stuff we left back in there," he says, nodding to the store at the side of the road, "before anything starts showing up wondering what all the noise was about." He glances at the damp, dark patch on the sleeve of the hand he's shaking, and lets go, wrinkling his nose a little. "And you probably oughtta lose the coat before we all get infected with zombie barf." Billy looks so horribly guilty that it's almost funny, so Eli claps him companionably on the shoulder and says, "Don't worry, man, we'll get you a new one."
"Honk if we get company," Teddy adds, starting to head back to the abandoned store. Eli follows him, trying not to worry about whether inviting a guy on board who's as majorly not together as Billy seems to be is really a good idea.
countersparking said I should, so ... yeah ... It does not have a title yet because I suck at those and it's not like I'm, idk, posting this around to comms or anything.
Anyway, this is the first part of probably several of what I guess is probably best summed up as an AU Young Avengers zombie roadtrip, it is about 3600 words, and it contains mild zombies and some nerdery that will make you want to slap me.
The bike has pros and cons.
Billy's gone over them in his head over and over while pedalling breathlessly through stretches of abandoned suburbia, just for something to think of besides how he's probably going to die.
Cons first: it's not as quiet as he'd like it to be, it's harder to maneuver over ... debris, and if he falls while he's trying to make an escape, he's screwed.
Pros: it's faster than running would be.
Unfortunately, the fact that there are so many cons usually just steers him back to the fact that he's probably going to die, but the one pro is a pretty big pro. Faster than running means faster than basically anything that wants to kill him, and he is totally willing to sacrifice silence, which he's never been all that good at anyway, and the potential risk of his wheels slipping in something he'd prefer not to think about and him crashing to an early death, in exchange for being faster than things that want to kill him. He's gotten better at watching where he's going, anyway.
Still, right now he's thinking about how he's probably going to die. He doesn't even know where he is any more, somewhere in New Jersey, still suburbs, and it's quiet.
Too quiet.
That doesn't really mean anything, because it's always too quiet. Just him and the tickticktickticktick of his bike, and whenever anything hears it or sees him moving he pedals faster until it's gone.
And it's worked okay for him so far. It's not that often he has to beat anything off with the big heavy stick he keeps in his backpack along with all the tins he could cram in there after – when he left – the ones he's rationing carefully, and rationing them carefully means he doesn't have to venture into anywhere potentially unsafe to look for food just yet.
Which is great. Billy is 100% for not venturing into potentially unsafe places.
Sure, everything is a potentially unsafe place now, but potentially unsafe open spaces are way better than potentially unsafe enclosed spaces when your main method of coping with what makes the spaces potentially unsafe is to jump on your bicycle and try to get away from it as fast as possible.
And you can't ride a bicycle indoors.
"... Professor Oak says, there's a time for everything," he mutters grimly, scanning the empty street ahead for anything shambling and lurchy. "But not now."
He sleeps squashed up against a dumpster with the bike pulled in front of him like a shield. Or ... a cage, if he wants to get metaphory, which he doesn't. He's surrounded by empty houses full of empty beds he could be using, but the empty houses freak him out too much, and besides, some of them definitely have corpses in them. And only some of those corpses don't move. He'd rather be out here, where if anything moves at him he can get the hell out of there.
Sometimes this has resulted in him biking like three blocks because a cat hissed at him after dark, but seriously, better safe than sorry, and for all he knows there might be zombie cats or something.
He hopes there aren't any zombie cats around here.
It's a warm night, but he still huddles up and pulls the hood of his jacket down over his face. He's exhausted and he's ... aware of that, but he knows that if he falls into a sleep as deep as he needs, he ... won't not wake up, because if he thought that'd happen he thinks he might be willing to go for that. It's not as horrible as the idea of waking up to something bloodstained and mindless that used to be a person, gnawing his foot off. Which is probably what will happen if he lets his guard down, if he's not ready to wake up at the slightest noise.
It's kind of a miracle he manages to sleep at all, but. You adjust.
As it turns out, the noise that wakes him up while it's still dark isn't really all that slight. His first reaction, like it is practically whenever he wakes up, is fear, but then his brain catches up enough to realize that it's the distant roar of an engine, and two things occur to him, one that makes his heart leap and one that makes it sink in terror.
The first: zombies do not drive cars, so whoever is driving that car is a person, which means there is someone alive somewhere near here and he is not alone.
The second: everything near here is going to hear that noise.
He gets to his feet and onto his bike in a quick, practiced scramble, and gets moving.
Tickticktickticktick.
He can't see too well in the dark, but he's learned that apparently it doesn't bother the undead. He just has to hope that they'll be more interested in the louder noise of the motor engine – it's getting closer by the second, though, and while he's more than willing to just follow it as fast as he can for however long it takes for him to catch up, even if that's days, he'd rather – rather get them to see him as soon as possible.
He tries not to think about what he can't quite see, not to imagine things moving in the dark, because if anything is lurking there it can't catch him, he can go faster, it's okay it's okay it's okay it's okay – still, when something groans towards him from the left he swerves a little more than he needs to and almost misses the corner he needs to turn to make it onto the road that he thinks he hears – that he hopes he hears – someone else coming this way down. He tries to drown out the too-slow sound of its footsteps behind him and focus on the engine, the glances of light he can see off trash cans and abandoned cars on the street ahead.
The car – it looks like an SUV but it's hard to tell in the dark – shoots past the end of the street while he's a few yards short of it – the light and noise are almost unreal, and he feels the wind from it on his face and thinks maybe he can see the people in it in the split second they're close enough –
Please let them see me please let them see me please let them see me, he repeats in his head as he pedals after the car, and it's only once the engine's roar isn't so close to be practically deafening that he realizes he's saying it out loud.
And they haven't seen him. Or if they have, they don't care. They don't stop or even slow down. It's not like he doesn't get why they wouldn't stop for someone – it's dark, this used to be a populated area, and Billy knows it's quiet round here, hasn't had to run away from anything for nearly two days until just now, but someone coming through here in a car, they're not gonna know that. And even if they did – maybe they just don't have room in their car. Maybe they don't have enough supplies to want to share with another person.
Or maybe they just didn't see him. He doesn't really know if that's worse – he doesn't know if he's making up excuses for people not to have stopped to make room for a guy trying to survive a zombie plague on a bicycle just because he wants so bad for someone to know he's still here that it doesn't matter if they don't even do anything about it.
It's entirely likely, he thinks. Which, yeah, would be pathetic, but he's always been kind of pathetic so what else is new?
He's not so pathetic he's just going to give up, though. He can still hear the engine ahead, still see the lights – nothing else for miles is noisy or lit up, he should be able to follow them even if he can't see them. And eventually they're going to have to stop for something – food, or gas, or – peeing or something.
"I don't take up that much room," he murmurs. "And I brought my own food, and I can leave when that runs out. Yeah." He'd be okay with even just – stopping to talk to them for a little while. Say hi. And then just ... be on his way. Wherever his way is.
The car's faster than he can pedal, but it's not as fast as it could be going. Probably because it's dark. Probably because they don't know this area. Probably because you never know when you're gonna have to slow down to make sure you don't wind up with something that wants to kill and eat you smashing through your windshield if you're not careful enough.
He just has to make sure he's paying attention to the things that want to kill him and eat him all around him as well as following the car.
No problem. He's faster than them.
The car is faster than him, and the gap between them is getting bigger with every turn of his wheels, but he'll catch up. It's a purpose, and he hasn't had one of those for a while – besides "not dying", that is.
"Catch that car or die trying" has a way better ring to it than "don't die or die trying", anyway.
Dawn breaks to a thinning out of houses, bigger streets, and Billy's not sure how he feels about that, so he lists the pros and cons.
Cons: The car, and he can still hear its engine far ahead, will be able to go faster, and he won't be able to keep up. And highways are full of crashed cars and dead people – all the people who weren't in the suburbs any more, who tried to get out – so, more zombies.
Pros: The car might not actually be able to go faster because of all the wrecks and zombies.
And that might not even be a pro, because if they have to stop because of zombies, the likelihood they're going to be even a bit willing to open the door for someone is basically nil.
"Fuck," Billy murmurs under his breath, but he has no other direction to go in right now. He knows what's going to happen. He's going to keep on following the car until he can't hear it any more, and then he's going to keep on following it until he's stopped imagining he can still hear it, and then he's going to find some corner to eat a tin of something and collapse and then he's going to wake up and pick up right where he left off. But he just can't bring himself to give up on this. It's the first sign of actual life he's seen ... that he's seen in a while.
He keeps going, appreciating that daylight makes it easier to see the things that make fumbling grabs for him as he weaves around them – he doesn't like looking at them, but it beats not knowing where they are.
For instance: if it was still dark, he wouldn't be able to see the one that's suddenly loomed up in front of him in time to avoid running straight into it. It's only got one arm, like the other one got caught in something and it didn't care enough to stop it being yanked off – which, sure, grisly, but that's one less hand to try and grab him. Unfortunately it's trying to make up for it with its jaws – when he swerves to one side to keep from running right into it, it makes a lunge for his right arm, and its teeth clamp onto his sleeve.
Still pedalling, he makes a sort of terrified yelp, and it gurgles a growl, blood and bile bubbling up from its throat and soaking the fabric of his jacket. Billy has never been gladder that he wears baggy clothes. He pedals as fast as he can, hoping he can shake it off or something, but it doesn't let go, just makes a one-armed flailing grab for him and succeeds in catching hold of the strap of his backpack and making him wobble distressingly. "Get off," he groans, "Get off get off get off –"
He glances back to the road ahead just in time to narrowly avoid crashing into the open door of an abandoned car – his instinct is to give it a wide berth but he makes the split second decision to keep close enough that the zombie smacks into it with a nasty, crunching thud.
This might have worked, he realizes a second later, with it still hanging off him with a vengeance, if zombies, like, felt pain or even gave a damn if you hit them with things. Stupid. He's not going to shake it off, it's going to make him crash, and then it's going to claw its way into his innards and eat them and he'll probably still be alive when it's doing that and – no, no, maybe he has half a hope if he can get his coat and backpack off while he's still moving so the zombie just rolls down the street behind him with a mouthful of sleeve and a handful of bag –
It opens its mouth to hiss at him, and he jerks his arm out of the way before it can make another go of closing its teeth on him – it tumbles backward, now just hanging on by its fingers clamped onto his bag; its legs are dragging against the road and he thinks one of them might be broken but he knows that's not going to stop it stumbling after him if he stops the bike. "Get off!" He fumbles one-handed with the straps of the bag, trying to keep the bike from capsizing. He's got one strap free of his shoulder – unfortunately, not the one that the zombie is hanging off – and he's trying to swap hands when there's the deafening crack of a gunshot and the zombie's body gives a sharp backwards jerk – if its leg wasn't broken before, it is now.
It's still holding on, but Billy forces himself to look away from it as another shot rings out – the gun's in the unsteady hands of a boy his age with short dark hair. He looks scared. It's so not a good face for someone pointing a gun in his direction that Billy barely even remembers to be glad that he's looking at another living human being – in fact he feels more terrified now than he did ten seconds ago when the only thing he had to worry about was the zombie hanging off his arm.
When their eyes meet, the other boy's widen and he yells, "Hold still!" Billy stares back at him, wondering how the hell he expects him to hold still when there is a zombie attached to his bike, when if he stops moving his legs it's probably going to sink its teeth into his ankle, and then the boy fires again. Billy winces, but, for all the worst case scenarios going through his head in that split second, the bullet doesn't hit him – the extra weight on his right side is suddenly gone, though, and with no time for Billy to compensate for the change in balance, the bike abruptly falls over sideways.
For a moment all he can do is blink at the ashphalt that his face is now unhappily close to, kind of seeing stars and not totally sure what the hell just happened. The next moment he registers that he is in pain, but it's the kind of pain he can get up from – the kind of pain he has to be able to get up from really damn quickly if he wants to go on not being dead – so he ignores his stinging palm and aching knee and starts to push himself up, on autopilot, ready to get back on the bike and get going ... except that he's being offered a hand up, the boy with the gun looking down at him with a mixture of concern and disbelief.
"Hey – are you okay?"
Billy blinks back at him. He's not entirely sure he trusts himself to form words, but he takes the boy's hand, and, with his help, stumbles free of the bike and to his feet.
A little way off, behind the boy who apparently just saved him from a really pathetic and probably kind of slapstick death-by-zombie-and-bicycle, there's a slate-grey SUV.
Billy stares at it incredulously for a second, and then lets his hands fall to his sides, and laughs.
Eli's shoving an armful of canned fruit into his bag when the gunshots come from outside. He exchanges just the briefest of looks with Teddy, who's on the other side of the store looking for bottled water – both of them immediately drop what they're plundering and, weapons at the ready, make a run for the door. Nate can probably take care of himself, sure, but neither of them is willing to take a chance on that.
Fortunately, the car's not surrounded by a sudden horde of zombies when they get out there, it's just Nate and one other figure – Eli takes aim on a reflex, but Teddy's hand on the muzzle of his gun dissuades him.
"Hey, wait, hang on. It's not ..."
Eli doesn't really need to be told – he can see, now, that it's not a zombie, it's a skinny kid who is apparently completely alive, going from the fact that he's talking to Nate and Nate's not shooting him in the face or locking himself in the car.
"Where the hell did he come from?" Eli wonders aloud as Nate waves and beckons them over.
"Did you find anything?" Nate asks as the two of them reach the road.
"Yeah," says Teddy, "but we came out here as soon as we heard ..."
The new guy winces a little and glances over his shoulder. "Yeah. Sorry."
Eli looks at Nate, raising an eyebrow. "Were you shooting at him?"
"No," Nate starts, but the new guy interrupts him.
"I was – coming up the road and there was a, a – it was hanging off my bike and –"
"Your bike –?" There is indeed a bicycle lying sadly on its side a little way down the road. About a foot from it is a one-armed corpse, a woman with short blonde hair, bloody and motionless. Eli looks away quickly, back to the owner of the bicycle. "You biked out here? From where?"
"Manhattan. I don't know how far it is, it's been – ... I don't know."
He looks at the ground, and Eli stares at him. He's filthy, and he looks exhausted and half-starved. There's something that looks like a sturdy length of wood sticking out of his backpack, but apart from that he's not even armed. Eli's professional opinion, where professional here means he has been shooting zombies out of an SUV for about a week and a half, is that there is no way this guy should be alive – and judging by the look on Teddy's face, and Nate's, he's not alone there. Eli's about to ask how the hell that is even possible, but Teddy cuts in first, his voice a lot gentler than Eli knows he would have been. "Where are you headed?"
Bicycle kid looks up as though startled, and shakes his head. "I ... I don't know. Away." He stares at the three of them. "What - what about you?"
Teddy looks at Nate with a tired smile, and Eli, knowing what's coming, lifts his eyes briefly heavenward. "We're going to New Mexico," Nate says. "It's kind of a long story, but ... you wanna come with us?"
Bicycle kid doesn't really look like he's even really taking this in, but his face starts to break into a grin and he replies breathlessly, "Yeah – I mean, sure. Okay."
Nate nods, smiling a faintly relieved little smile even though, seriously, what did he expect – for the guy to be like no thanks, I'm going to stick with my rickety bicycle? "We'd better get in the car," he says with a wary glance at the grisly corpse. "I'm Nate – this is Eli, and Teddy." He has to look at bicycle kid expectantly for a couple of seconds before he seems to catch on that this is where he offers his own name.
"Billy."
Eli offers a hand for him to shake, which Billy takes, his own grip unsteady. "We probably oughtta go pick up all the stuff we left back in there," he says, nodding to the store at the side of the road, "before anything starts showing up wondering what all the noise was about." He glances at the damp, dark patch on the sleeve of the hand he's shaking, and lets go, wrinkling his nose a little. "And you probably oughtta lose the coat before we all get infected with zombie barf." Billy looks so horribly guilty that it's almost funny, so Eli claps him companionably on the shoulder and says, "Don't worry, man, we'll get you a new one."
"Honk if we get company," Teddy adds, starting to head back to the abandoned store. Eli follows him, trying not to worry about whether inviting a guy on board who's as majorly not together as Billy seems to be is really a good idea.