Chapter Text
That motherfucker scientist shitbag. Bryan feels the wave cresting above his head while Stanley crams the syringe that would actually save his life, mother of fuck, Jesus, he needs to get it he needs to get it and stick it somewhere in him and press the plunger and everything will go back to normal. Everything will go back to normal and he won't have slammed a woman into the ceiling or crushed that douchebag scientist to death with a desk or eaten all those bodies or felt his eye pop and swell or seen his fingers turn into tendrils like that poor fucking kid in the RV, the one he wanted to help but was really dead the whole time. He's been dead this whole time. The wave is so close to crashing. He can only see a sliver out of his eye, he can only feel the very tips of his fingers. The syringe is in that scientist's labcoat pocket. He can still get it. It can still be okay.
He slams into the decontamination room and round the corner. The guy's still running. The fuck is he gonna do with the syringe that's more important, huh? The other scientists told him to stick Bryan with it and he's too chickenshit scared of Bryan to actually do it. Bryan who screamed when he saw a mouse in the basement last week and had to get Michelle to put down traps. Bryan who couldn't hit the broad side of a barn with a laser-sight sniper rifle. Bryan who—
Eat eat eat hungry growing need food need flesh need grow.
Fuck. Bryan can't move his head anymore, can only just make out the swelling waving mass he's becoming. He needs the syringe. He needs it and then he can go home and tell Michelle he loves her so fucking much and they should have this baby, but he has a little bit of hospital trauma to work through now, so can she get Katie to take her to the gynecologist for a little while? He can go home and call his mom, who's been screening his calls ever since he lost the office job, he can go home and eat a fucking sandwich and quit the courier job and maybe get fucking murdered by the government for all the people he's just killed.
He killed people. He killed them. He can taste their blood at the back of his throat, cloying and delicious and iron-rich. It's amazing. His sight is starting to clear, sharper than it's ever been. His arm doesn't hurt anymore.
There's that syringe again. The scientist is waving it around kind of uselessly, like he can't reach Bryan with it. That's crazy. Bryan is literally holding the scientist in his tendrils right now, he's got him wrapped up, he's got the guy's wrist wrapped tight. He pulls hard and — the syringe drops. He can see the sickly green falling away from him. He doesn't know why he cared so much. He feels amazing. He's finally ready. He can feel the scream building in his throat. There's a half-dozen helicopters closing in and he thinks if he bends his knees and leaps he could reach the first one, hang from the railings and rip the whole fucking thing apart.
Nothing's wrong with Bryan. There's something wrong with the world. There's so many living bodies he can hear and smell and they should all be inside him, part of the body he's building. He can feel them screaming inside him and it tastes incredible. He's all of them at once. He's not anybody. He's everyone.
A storm of bullets comes towards him from the helicopter. He doesn't know what that is. He doesn't know what he was thinking. He can't think. There's something hot and sharp cutting into his beautiful body, the thick tendrils and mass of limbs and the gorgeous constellation of pupils and sclera that erupts from the side of his disgusting human face.
He can see so far. He can see all the way to the snow-covered fields. There are red and blue lights out there. He doesn't know what that means.
There are hot, weeping sores that open up all over him. His arm was like that. No. His arm has always been like that. Now is all there is. Precious blood oozes from every part of his system, trickles burning acid into hardness beneath, and the lead is starting to weigh him down. He's on something hard and then he's falling. The something feels something it something he's something. He's something. He's nothing. Nothing is nothing.
It's nothing.
There's a typewriter.
Bryan opens his eyes and then he screams. He screams so loud and so long and he forgot about the woman he hit with his car, he forgot about the dead couple that lived in this farmhouse and their dog that literally opened up like the fucking Thing from the Carpenter movie, he forgot about the shotgun in his hands. He forgot he's a fucking person. He forgot he didn't get the shells until after the typewriter. He dies.
There's a typewriter.
Bryan screams again. He screams while he runs to the bedroom and opens the drawer and spills shotgun shells all over the floor. He screams when he shoots the guy in the head before he can jump him and he screams when he shoots the girl and he screams when he grabs a lamp from the end table and slams it into both their bodies until they're nothing but bloody pulp.
Then he throws up.
He throws up all over the bodies actually, and the acidic burn at the back of his throat makes him think of the hospital elevator. He retches again and scrambles away from the bodies, propels himself backwards until he hits the wall. Michelle rings off. Fuck. He should've picked up. The phone was ringing the whole time. He should've listened to her voice. He should've listened to her in the fucking car on the way to the first fucking hospital. He should've told that doctor to shove it and driven home. He should be on the couch with his girlfriend figuring out what the fuck they were going to do with a baby when he's stuck in the gig economy and Michelle is only just starting her master's.
While he's retching over the hall rug, the guy's wife comes outta the bathroom and Bryan can't bring the shotgun up in time to stop her biting him. She's got her teeth in his leg and the teeth are coming out of her fucking hooha. It's horrible. Bryan thinks he might be being prejudiced against the elderly, but then he shoots her so that her head explodes and he thinks murder is probably worse than ageism.
"Fuck," he says. It's the first thing he's said in a while. His throat feels disgusting. His whole body is shaking. His leg — his leg is going to —
With sudden, clarion certainty, he knows. He has to cut off his fucking leg.
"This is my favourite leg," he whines. But then he pushes himself up on his feet and forces himself to put weight on it.
He falls over when his knee buckles. So he crawls, okay, he can crawl, he crawls down the hall and butt-shuffles down the stairs like a kid, and he makes it to the kitchen where he was drinking milk and shoving handfuls of cereal in his mouth a couple hours or minutes ago.
There's a carving knife in the mess where the table flipped. Bryan can see it, the blade reflecting the warm light from the ceiling lamp. Fuck, it looked so nice when he came in. It was so normal. There weren't any fluids anywhere or anything.
He looks in every drawer for something else. It could be funny, he guesses, when he pulls out shit like a ladle and a set of cake forks and an old birthday candle. It would be funny if he wasn't about to cut off his fucking leg.
"These fucking guys vegan or what?" He asks. He knows they're not. He drank the full fat milk already, fuck his lactose intolerance. He's fucking traumatised.
The last cupboard he checks there's a fucking saw or some shit. It's got a power cord and a serrated blade and it takes a couple seconds before Bryan can connect the switchboard in his brain to get 'electric carving knife'. He thinks maybe he had an aunt that used one at a family Thanksgiving, before his dad died and everything went to shit.
He plugs it in the nearest outlet and then has to sit down and have a panic attack about the whole thing. His lungs are heaving and he's retching again, spitting bile down the front of his winter jacket and sweater, he can feel the pressure of his chest swelling and changing, feel the snap of his ribs and sternum as they exploded outward to make space for the mouth. Fuck. He can't breathe. He's going to fucking die again and there's going to be a fucking typewriter.
"Who fucking uses typewriters anyway," he snaps, between panting breaths. "Get a fucking, Macbook Pro, you fucking psychopath." The dead guy doesn't say anything which is good because if he did then Bryan would just scream again. His throat hurts. He can't breathe.
He doesn't really calm down. He just gets used to the panic attack enough that he can put shaking hands on the leg of his pants and roll them up past his knee. The lady bit him right above the ankle and he can already see the black sickness creeping up the blood vessels around it. There's a throbbing pain there and just looking at the teeth marks is going to make him pass out or some shit.
The turkey saw is in his hand. He's been clutching it real tight since he plugged it in. The cord's pretty long, which he guesses is lucky. It probably wasn't designed for deadend losers to perform a self-amputation in some dead couple's farmhouse kitchen.
It hurts. Of course it hurts. He sets the blade above the furthest black vessel then has a sudden and visceral memory of a high school assembly about road accidents. Or maybe it was about first aid? Or like, emergency rescue on Mount Everest. Whatever. If he just cuts off his leg he's going to bleed to death like, immediately, instead of bleeding to death in like two hours when he's up fourteen flights of stairs in Raccoon City Hospital.
Fuck, he still has to climb all those stairs. He is not getting in that fucking elevator.
He can't climb stairs with one leg. Well, okay, he maybe could, he's not saying people with one leg can't climb stairs, obviously he's not saying that, he's not an asshole like that. But he's not going to climb any fucking stairs.
If he can't climb the stairs he can't deliver the serum. If he can't deliver the serum they can't cure the fucking mutant plague. If they can't cure the mutant plague there's no reason to even go to the fucking city. He might as well cut and run - ha. Good joke.
He snorts. If he cuts he's not running anywhere.
Then there's a weird flicker in the ceiling lamp and the electric carving knife turns itself on. He screams. There's not much to do but scream, really. The fucking thing gets stuck in the bone and the vibrations make him throw up again, but there's nothing to throw up, and when his body tries it makes his legs spasm, and that moves the carving knife, and that makes him try to throw up even more.
It's agony. It's worse than anything he's felt. He wasn't paying attention when he turned into a monster. He was thinking about the cure. He wasn't feeling the way his bones twisted and melted, wasn't aware of the way his dick got hard when the bodies got shoved into his new mouth.
He manages to clench his hand around the cord and pulls the plug out of the wall. He thinks maybe he actually rips the cord out of the plug, but he doesn't give a shit if he sets fire to this horrible shitty farmhouse in the middle of the assfuck awful mountains. He thinks maybe if he did he'd just let himself get consumed by the flames.
His leg hurts. The vibrations stopped but there's a fucking saw in his leg and it's in the bone and he's bleeding so much. There's spurts of blood coming out where it hit an artery and he's starting to feel woozy and tired. Well. Woozier and tired-er. There's black spots crowding into his vision.
The phone is ringing again. He crawls to the wall where the receiver hangs and crab-walks his hand up until he can tangle bloody fingers in the cord. It falls off the wall and lands just by his head. He doesn't remember lying down.
Michelle is on the line. "Michelle, baby," he says, pleased. That's his girlfriend. He loves her a lot. "I love you a lot."
"Bryan, what the fuck, why the fuck are you in some old couple's house? You're meant to be in Raccoon City by now."
"Already been," he slurs, a giggle bubbling up from somewhere deep. His eyes are shut. He's imagining Michelle. "It's shit. Don't take the baby there."
"Bryan, you sound — fuck. I love you. I'm calling 911." Michelle's panicking, Bryan thinks. He doesn't know why. He's feeling pretty good now actually. His leg doesn't really hurt anymore.
"My leg doesn't hurt anymore," he says. It's definitely clear. He's not slurring, he thinks. "'M okay. Love you."
Michelle already hung up. 911 won't help, Bryan thinks. 911 is going to get here when he's already a zombie, and then he's going to eat them.
He pries his eyes open. His leg is still spurting blood. The handgun is in his coat pocket.
It fits nicely under his chin. The first time he tries, the safety's on. It's kind of funny, so he laughs. Then he turns it off and tries again.
There's a typewriter.
Bryan climbs over the table and jumps out of the window. The glass doesn't shatter like it does in the movies and he gets cuts all over his hands.
He lands weird and his ankle bends at a bad angle. He hears a snap.
Snow's meant to be soft. He thinks this whole thing is fucking bullshit.
The girl he hit with his car runs right at him and he unloads the rest of the handgun clip into her skull, close range so he can't miss. Her blood gets in his mouth. He doesn't think this is a 28 Days Later type outbreak, but he still won't take risks.
He lied earlier. He saved one bullet, and it goes in through the roof of his mouth and out the back of his skull.
There's a typewriter.
This time Bryan picks it up and throws it through the window. He's not screaming. He feels weirdly calm. It's kind of like he's watching himself do things.
Then that reminds him of turning into an actual fucking monster with tentacles and shit and he slams back into his body. Now he's screaming.
This time the old guy does get the jump on him, but Bryan shoots him and then gets the car girl with the shotgun and then - this is crucial, he's making a fucking mental note of this - he drags the old guy's body to the study and throws it out of the window he just broke. The car girl's tendrils don't start growing this time. He wonders what that's about.
Then he snaps out of that and dives for the phone.
"Michelle!" He shouts, way too loud. "Michelle, baby, oh fuck, oh my god."
"Bryan," says Michelle. She's pissed, he can hear it, and fuck he's so glad to talk to her and he's not bleeding out and he's maybe going to make it to the next fucked up part of this horrible fucking day. "You'd better have a great fucking reason for not picking up. Are you high?"
"No, I'm not high," says Bryan. Fuck, he wishes he was high right now. He's been sober almost six months. "I — look, I don't know how to explain what's going on. But it's, uh, it's dangerous. I wanted to tell you I want to have the kid with you. You wanted my thoughts, and I pussied out, and I'm sorry. You'll be a great mom." And he's not going to get to be a dad, he thinks. Not unless something really fucking crazy happens.
More crazy than waking up after he dies, anyway.
"Babe," says Michelle. She's kind of choked up. Bryan wishes he was home. He wishes they were curled up on the stupid ugly couch together with her head on his shoulder. He wishes he could be breathing in the smell of her shampoo and not rotting corpses and bile. "Baby, you're talking like you won't be there."
Bryan takes in a long, shaky breath. "I hope I will be," he says. He looks over his shoulder. There's nothing there, but the hairs on his neck are standing up anyway. His arm hurts.
There's nothing on his arm. He rubs at it with his other hand, receiver clenched between his shoulder and his ear.
Michelle says something. Bryan can't make it out. It sounds like she's going through a tunnel. "Are you driving?" He asks.
"I was on my way to Katie's," she says. "I'm taking the highway to Raccoon City."
Bryan feels like his whole body has been dunked in ice. "No you fucking aren't," he says. He thinks he might have shouted, actually. "No, you can't, Michelle, baby, you can't go there. You can't."
She's saying something back, he thinks, but he can't hear it. "Michelle, you can't go. You'll die. You'll die and I'll die and we'll all die, everything's gonna die, and I'll wake up and I have to do it again and again and you'll die and our baby's never gonna live, it'll be some fucked up little nightmare in a room full of blood and guts, you can't fucking go to the city, you gotta turn around right now, it's—"
He can't talk anymore. He's crying too hard. There's salt in his mouth. It tastes better than the blood.
Michelle might have hung up. He looks down at the phone receiver in his hand and then he realises the power's gone out. It's dark in the farmhouse.
There's something standing behind him.
There's a typewriter.
Bryan picks it up and throws it out of the window. He goes and pulls the old guy out of the closet he's hiding in and smashes his head against the wall until he goes still. He drags what's left to the study and heaves it out the window, watches the way the bones in the guy's legs splinter on impact.
The car girl is nearly here. The phone is ringing. He ignores it.
He can't think about it. He can't think. He just has to do.
His aim is getting better. He only takes two shots from the window before he makes one, gets the girl center mass and watches her fall. She won't be down for long.
The couple's pickup truck is in the same place. He has the keys and he knows where the padlock key is.
He fumbles it twice on the way from the driver's seat to the gate, then throws the whole padlock and key and chain as far as he can. It's not that far. He sees it through the windshield as he peels away.
The medical bag has a seatbelt round it. He needs to get it to the scientists. They're all cowardly pieces of shit, sure, but they can make the cure and there needs to be one. If he can get there without getting bit it might work.
There's only a gallon or two left in the tank. Bryan drives at a crawl so he can have the heater on for a little while, just enough than he can feel his fingers again. His phone is in his coat pocket. His ankle hurts from falling out of the barn and his head hurts just generally. He thinks he's tired. It's hard to keep that separate from being scared and angry and physically exhausted.
The truck grinds to a stop just outside the tunnel. Bryan kind of guessed it would be this way.
"Can't go over it," he mumbles as he picks his way past empty cars, past the abandoned carseats and potted plants and other remnants of lives prematurely ended. "Can't go under it." He pauses, then shrugs. "Worth a shot."
He gets to the RV. It's still wedged end to end against the walls. The inside is still dark. Bryan goes to his knees and looks underneath. He shines his phone torch and only panics a little at the battery level dipping beneath sixty percent.
If he lives long enough to need a charger he'll be fucking grateful.
The gap is dark and narrow. He reaches out with one hand and feels around a little. The ground seems clear as far as he can reach, and he can fit his head and shoulders underneath without too much trouble.
When he tests the medical bag, it just about fits. It's going to be tight. He went caving once with his dad, back on one of the weekends they'd gone camping, and he'd kind of liked the feeling of being in an enclosed space back then.
He doesn't think he'll feel that way underneath the RV; inside the RV there's a kid who's turning into a monster. Underneath it, who knows.
His first try doesn't go well. He gets stuck for a long minute when he turns the wrong way and wedges his shoulder against something in the suspension, and the flare of panic when he can't move back makes him feel like he's going to fucking die again. Then he calms down and wiggles backwards and makes it out.
He takes off his coat and his sweater. It's fucking cold out here but he needs to try this. He can always kill himself and try again if there's a zombie under this stupid RV.
He can always kill himself. It's a comforting thought as long as he doesn't examine it at all.
With his coat and sweater tied around each ankle, Bryan commando crawls back under the RV. There's barely enough clearance for his head, and he can feel things scraping at his scalp as he drags himself forward, fist over fist. He's just over halfway when he feels something pulling at his sweater.
He speeds up. He drags himself further and faster and he's just got his head clear of the other side of the RV when he feels tendrils wrapping round his ankle.
"Fuck!" He shouts. He kicks out and feels the pressure increase. He reaches for the handgun and yanks his whole body as much as he can. He feels something give in his leg and knows that he's going to be in a lot of pain very shortly.
He digs his elbows into the asphalt and feels the skin split. He turns his body at the hips and aims the handgun at his own leg. There's more tendrils now. One of them has that telltale shape that means it's about to bloom like some fucked up little flora dentata.
He thinks about the old woman. He didn't kill her this time. He doesn't feel great about that either way. Then he aims at the biggest tendril and pulls the trigger.
Nothing. The fucking safety.
The big flower thing lunges at his face and Bryan just had time to flick the safety and miss another shot before it sinks its teeth in.