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iZombie
Life During the End Times
Ravi shoved the slab into its drawer with far too much force, which meant that it hurtled to the end of its tracks, and the speed of the impact sent it careening backward too fast for Ravi to react. The corner of the drawer hit him squarely in the flesh of his hip. He doubled over, bringing his face within inches of the sallow-skinned corpse.
The bloodless, purple lips seemed to be twisted into a smirk, though with the dead man’s eyes closed he couldn’t tell whether the expression was malicious or lighthearted—except, of course, it was neither. This corpse wasn’t smirking at him. The one standing across from him holding out a mug of steaming coffee on the other hand….
Exhaustion must have been getting to him. He wouldn’t let Liv call herself a corpse, so he damn well shouldn’t start using the word himself. Just, something about the way she shoved him behind her within seconds of the interloper’s appearance reminded him that cure or no, she would still be the one to take on the zombies who wanted to crack his head open, willingly relenting to the rage that terrified her in order to keep him safe.
Being immune to the zombie virus did not necessarily make life easierfor a human living in a city that being taken over by Filmore-Graves. Seattle had once been the fastest growing city in America—a fact Ravi cited to his parents repeatedly during conversations meant to convince himself that taking the job in the King County morgue wouldn’t be a life-ruining move—but it quickly became Zombie Ithmus far more quickly than anyone in Ravi’s circle anticipated. It seemed that while a super-secret zombie island would take years, manipulating the populace of a terrified port city allowed for a swift regime change. Floyd Baracus’s election had clearly been arranged to give lip-service to beginning with a peaceful transition of power, but the plots of Vivian Stoll and her stepson did not come together easily. Too many members of the zombie population were newly-turned and mistrustful, and not everyone who got the shot that resulted in their infection was a devotee of Johnny Frost. If Liv hadn’t realized that any number of ignorant new recruits might have the same idea she’d come up with in those first few days of desperate cravings, well, they might have come across more than one tortured soul during the time it took them to follow through on resolving a consequence that Filmore-Graves had likely never considered.
“You sure his teeth didn’t break skin?” Liv asked as she secured the padlock that would hopefully render the doors to the morgue impenetrable, even by the most adrenaline-fueled Ramero.
“Let’s get back to the real question.” Ravi slid the sleeve of his lab coat down over the purple blood-blister forming on his right forearm, more to keep himself from continuing to examine the red dot in the center than to hide it from Liv. They’d both been obsessed enough over the bandaged scratch she carved into his arm, they didn’t need to torture themselves over whether multiple exposures, or virus strains, or time, or any other number of variables would affect the way his body reacted to the infection. It would be obvious soon enough. “You broke in here months before you got the job?”
Ravi knew better than anyone that the blood in Liv’s body didn’t flow quickly enough to cause a true blush, but he’d spent so long needling her—sometimes being the only one in her life who ever provided her with a proper gentle ribbing—meant that he knew the tics that revealed Liv’s emotions no matter whose brains were influencing her behavior. Her cheeks might pinken eventually, if he kept prodding whatever sore spot he’d found, but the fingers of one hand would alwaystoy with the ends of her fragile hair, and she would duck her head. He used to think that the instinctual desire to hide came as a result of her condition, but then he met her mother, and Peyton, and Major, and he understood that while Liv loved them, and they her, some part of her had always been invested in stifling the parts of herself that were unexpected. She wouldn’t have been able to mask her infection for so long if she hadn’t already been hiding.
Which brought him back to the truth bomb she’d just dropped about that nebulous, dark time between the boat party and the day he became the first member of her Scooby gang.
Liv tucked a chunk of hair behind her ear and glanced toward his office where Peyton sat with her laptop on his desk, and her phone pressed to one ear. Ravi wasn’t sure how Liv managed to convince her to attempt to negotiate her place as a human in the zombie mayor’s government remotely, but he was grateful. The half-rabid man they’d encountered attempting to gain access to the sweet, sweet gray matter in the police department’s basement wouldn’t be the only one willing to resort to violence. If he had to be honest Ravi didn’t think that Baracaus would keep any promises made about protecting his people, at least those who were unwilling to be infected, but that would be a problem for later. Now, he allowed himself to be led out of Peyton’s earshot, joining Liv who’d perched on an empty gurney.
“The first brain, the one Sean E. filmed me eating, it kept me in homeostasis for a while. A few days, maybe? Long enough to go to Marcy’s funeral. Long enough to go back to work without causing too many whispers, but I was doing scut work. Stitches in the ER, that kind of thing. Their morgue has pretty tight security, which is hard to circumvent when you’re stupid-levels of starving, but I got past them once or twice. Maybe I thought that would be sustainable, I don’t…. that whole period is kind of a blur of hunger, denial, hunger, denial…” She gestured, tracing a wave in the air. Her hand was shaking. Ravi reached up and clasped it in his. She smiled at him, but her eyes were brimming with tears. Not for the first time that day, that hour, he wished he’d confronted her sooner, been there sooner. He knew that logically it wasn’t his fault that their paths crossed when they did, in the way they did, but if he’d been on-the-scene that night, instead of here, if he’d been on the beach, a friendly face when she woke—
But would he have been? He had calmed her down that day at the docks, but he knew her. She’d been Liv, not an unknown person—unknown thing—bursting from a body bag. He’d likely have run as fast as that paramedic did, loath as he was to admit it.
“There was a pile-up on the freeway. All hands on deck. One of the first patients that came in, he had a skull fracture. I could…. God, Ravi, I could smell it coming. I hadn’t eaten in a few days but I wasn’t…. I wasn’t starving. Not enough to… Cognitively, I mean… “ She took a deep breath, looked down, and then raised her head, holding her neck up with a steely resolve that he knew to be Liv, purely Liv. “I was me. I was there, and yet it took absolutely everything in me not to jump on the gurney and let instinct take over. One of the other residents grabbed my arm. I shrugged him, and…well… It broke his arm.
“The next thing I knew I was in my supervisor’s office, and my mom was there, and they were talking about psych evaluations, leaves of absence, marks on my permanent record. I might as well have been a kid in the principal’s office.”
“What, like you’d know anything about that?”
To his surprise, she smirked. “You’d be surprised. I was pretty angry after my dad died.”
“Mmm, the thing you forget, Liv Moore, is that I’m not surprised. I know you.” He said this to reassure her, but the truth was that angry twelve-year-old Liv wasn’t difficult at all to fit into his mental picture of her past. It explained a lot about her relationship with her mother, for instance; not to mention that the kind of drive it took to survive med school didn’t come out of nowhere. In his case, it came from an obsession with science and a thirst to prove people wrong. Liv wasn’t all that different.
“Anyway, I guess Mom saved my medical license. That’s lost in the blur. One of the next things I remember is sneaking in here. Security has gotten a lot more observant in the past few months, I guess. I only got to eat once. There was a body open on the table. The second time I couldn’t find an opening, but I did find a job description on the notice board.”
“Alonso.”
“Excuse me?”
“That would have been during the very short tenure of Intern Alonso. He had a bad habit of dropping everything at the end of his shift lest he be here a minute longer than… well, he didn’t even stay until ‘necessary,’ truthfully. Mind you, he never seemed to be as aware of time time at the beginning of his shift.”
“Whereas, you frequently had to kick me out. Which is what would have happened if your friend Alonso hadn’t been grossly negligent. I could have gotten myself a lifetime ban, or arrested, or…who knows? Honestly, that was probably the time Hungry-Liv scared Sated-Liv the most. I’d managed not to come close to hurting anyone, but my sense of self-preservation…. I think I wanted to be caught, in the end.”
They sat there in silence for a moment, and he remembered how quiet the morgue had felt in the time before his discovery of the truth. How guarded she seemed, how rigid. Incredibly, he had been removing a bullet from her heart at the moment he first came to understand how fragile she really was.
“What I want right now is to tell you that I wouldn’t have kicked you out, that I would have been the one to understand, but I doubt you’d believe that even if I could be one-hundred percent certain of its truth. But what I can say, Olivia Moore, is that if we had met while you were stealing brains from my morgue and things had gone awry it would be one of the worst possible alternate universes possible for me, and not just because I’d never be on track to win a Nobel for curing the zombie plague.”
Liv snorted, her lips curling up in that trembling smile that he had come to take such pride in. “Wow, I actually got that. Thank, residual nerd brain.”
“Oh, please, don’t think you can get away with lying about your Grey’s Anatomy fanfiction.”
Ravi startled at the sound of Peyton’s voice, a part of him had forgotten that she was in the building, which is honestly one of the most surprising changes the past few weeks has wrought.
“Her what?” Even he could never have imagined being filled with quite this much glee in the middle of the imitate ruination of what he had considered to be his normal life.
Peyton cackled, and Liv’s fingers went immediately to the ends of her hair. “L-look,” she stammered. “It was right before college, I wanted to be a doctor, it’s set in Seattle….It was research!”
“Sure. And your love affair with Patrick Dempsey had nothingto do with it.”
“Er, to be fair to Liv, she did manage to land Major Lilywhite.”
“Acknowledged,” Peyton said. “But I’m not sure who consumed more tequila during the wooing process, Meredith Grey, or Olivia Moore.”
To his surprise, Liv didn’t deny this accusation. Instead she gritted her teeth and muttered something about Jack Daniels being poured into a kettle. Ravi let out a small laugh meant to defuse the sudden tension, but his mind had gone back to the period surrounding Lowell’s death and wondered—not for the first time—if Liv were more likely to take on certain traits more than others. One day when they had the leisure time to chase butterflies he’d have to look into possible epigenetic reactions.
“Anyway, back to our disastrous present,” Peyton declared. “How the hell is it that D-Day has happened, rations are being delivered as we speak, and people are still behaving as though the apocalypse is neigh?” She brandished her cell-phone so violently that Ravi could picture it flying into the formaldehyde on a nearby shelf.
“Because it could,” Liv said, solemnly. “Sure, Filmore-Graves infected a third of the population, and the majority of them aren’t taking chunks out of their family, but some are.” She nodded to the drawer Ravi had wrestled shut only a few minutes before. “Not everyone will believe or understand the facts, and not all the ones who do will manage celibacy, so more infections will come. It’s unlikely that the virus will evolve immediately, but it will be faster than we think, and the next strain could produce immediate, irreversible Rameros the way that Supermax did…. A lot of unexpected things can happen.”
“Okay.” Peyton nodded slowly. “Point taken. The end could still be nigh. But, hey, unexpected is my jam, now, right? I did my running in shock. I’m in it for the long haul. Which means I need to call Floyd back. Again.”
She wrinkled her nose, and Liv laughed in the way that made Ravi wish he’d known her sooner. That didn’t happen often—he suspected that in some ways human-Liv had been unhappier than zombie-Liv—but it usually happened around Peyton, the one who had his position first. Sure, she could ignite Liv’s fury faster than most, but she could also make her smile; Ravi couldn’t deny that.
“Speaking of viral strains, Dr. Moore, would you like to get back at me for years of needle sticks and take the blood we need to measure my viral load?”
“Why, Dr. Chakrabarti, I’d love to,” she said in a mock-Scarlett O’Hara voice. She slid to the floor and held his hand out to him. He allowed her to pull him up and followed her across the room, just as he would follow her anywhere this new road took them. Chances were he’d have to remind her of that a few more times before they could even see the light at the end of the tunnel, but he didn’t mind.
He didn’t mind at all.