Work Text:
“This is like a bad movie,” Wei Ying told his shadow, for the upteenth time, because Mo Xuanyu was dead and he didn’t know if anyone else in the town was even willing to accept Wei Ying into their group.
The groaning body behind the wood fence—gutted, of course—groaned louder whenever Wei Ying moved. He felt bad. He didn’t say this.
He just couldn’t bear to tell Mo Xuanyu such things right now.
He looked at the sky, then his broken phone, then the sky again. Smoke billowed in the far distance. Yiling was very, very dead. Wei Ying had a mask on, and had long since switched locations—he had some knives, an empty gun, two screwdrivers. He ran out of fresh water and now waited for it to rain. It wasn’t summer, after all, and soon it would be winter. It wouldn’t smell like burnt skin all the time. It would probably smell like rot, dust, and rain. Did cold have a smell? Maybe.
“Yeah,” he repeated again, because he was still alive and he didn’t really know why. “A really bad zombie movie.”
—
Yiling was a ghost town.
There was death and dead bodies, there was broken glass and broken people. The streets were empty and trashed, the buildings were and led, the people had long since left. Yiling was the designated city, the place that had been barricaded so long ago.
When the disease hit, it had struck most hard. Those with pre-existing conditions fell first. Supply chains were hit. Children were not immune, and the elderly got sick before most knew what was causing the fevers and delirious words. It came and it stayed and it killed and it made people into things straight out of horror novels. When the disease had struck, people had crowded the hospitals, and some had lost their minds. That was what had been said, at least—seven years was a long time ago, now.
Multiple cities fell under the breaches of the sickness. A kindred thing, sharpened by grief, by blood and coughing and liquid that foamed from each and every body that was deemed contaminated.
Contaminated, ruined, scraped up off the concrete.
People burned their loved ones, killing them before the disease could expand—but the mercy killings stopped nothing. The people still got sick, the children still died, the cities still fell, and the houses were still broken and overran. No supplies, no way out, no electricity. Most fell victim to the death, to the disease that had taken the world by storm.
Full apocalypse, you could say—blood to blood, sharp knives and guns posed and ready to go bang.
Yiling was one of the first locations to be struck. It came by storm, came in the form of people seeking refuge from Yunmeng and Qishan—strangers and travelers from nearby towns and districts. The gates wide open, the streets crowded, people wearing masks and screaming at one another.
When the walls, made of steel and old rubble, were finally torn open by desperate souls, the citizens scattered. Grabbed their belongings and ran, hopped into cars and roared to life. It was either escaping or dying, and most would rather run far than shoot themself in the head before the air tainted their lungs. People needing safety brought the disease with them, brought death and cruelty on accident. A crime, a mistake, another misstep in their desperation for safety.
Mercy killings.
Yiling; the ghost town, the burning city, the pitted peak.
The thing was strange. The people left, the city became more or less abandoned. Those who could not leave were either hidden, locked inside their houses—forgotten about—or already dead. When you were sick, you became a corpse, and then you became something worse.
It was hard to say what you became after being infected, but no one kept anyone sick for long. When your blood was burgundy and your eyes were rimmed with red, and you hands shook, and your teeth chattered, and your mind drifted too far away for anyone to reach, you were contaminated.
You were a risk. You were a liability.
(Those people were not kept. They were not kept to be monitored or observed or loved. Once you were infected, at that last stage, you were no longer present as a conscious human.)
Other cities, the districts that had not been affected so severely, had blocked the roads off. The gates had been locked. The corpses had been stuck in—the giant pits of hell, the angry seething, the ghost town made of corpses and the sick. If you weren’t dead yet, you would be dead by the end of it. That was how it was. That was how life would end. That was—
So Yiling was closed after a year of the disease—and it spent nine years cultivating a crueler environment where the diseased thrived. Separated from the real world, let loose, cut down. Fires that painted the sky black, screams as apartments collapsed and the trapped people ran ruthlessly through the streets. Kill the undead or kill yourself. Kill the undead or they will kill you. Mindless and sick bastards, ruined by time, coughing blood and seeing with milky white eyes. They wandered, they hungered, and they were nothing like the living. That was a classic thing. Zombies. Mindless people, angry and angry and then even angrier.
Yiling was left to create monsters. A ghost town. That was what everyone else called it.
Ghosts lived past death, and death was no kinder than life. It was the fact of the living, of the world: when the disease struck, it struck hard, and not everyone would make it out. Not everyone could.
The rare few who did never quite made it back to the real world.
—
“Where are your parents?” An old woman asked him.
She looked sick, had blood across her face and splattered near the corners of her mouth. Her eyes were hazy, but she could still see where he held his knife in a vise.
She knew.
So did he.
“Don’t got any,” He muttered, quietly, pushing at his sweaty hair and hoping she understood. He needed to cut it. He needed to take the things from this house, too. He felt stupid for thinking he could waltz into his old home, for thinking that anyone would live inside it—undead or dead in memories. He looked at the old woman, his hand shaking from where he tapped his finger along the blade.
She set her gun down on the blood-soaked wood, the weapon old and rusted with burgundy.
He stared at her for a long moment, and then at the fireplace behind her, which was empty and charred. Above it were smoky pictures of his foster siblings. His own school photographs were nowhere to be found.
(His siblings’ bodies were the same way.)
Wei Ying wetted his lips. “Where’s yours?”
“Mine were dead a long time ago, hun,” The stranger said, and she nodded slowly. Her cheeks were pale. She shook like a leaf in winter, a leaf in an angry autumn storm. Her smile was thin lipped, now. “Do me a favor, please. Either kill me now, or—or leave. The infected all die eventually, so you don’t need to be the one to do it.” She smiled, raw, “You’re young.”
“I can,” Wei Ying said. He absolutely could. It was his issue, his secret—the urge to act, to bite, to tear, to cut. Back in the system he had suffered the same way. Out here, bleeding was a death wish, insurance.
He was not that reckless.
“Then have at it, huh?” She huffed, a little upturn to her mouth. Blood rolled down her temple. The bite mark on her hand was angry and raw, only a few hours old, but Wei Ying had seen it when she first got struck. She was fifty or so, maybe sixty. He felt bad to haunt, to kill someone who meant no harm—but she would cause it if she stayed.
“Okay,” He said—sixteen and weak in the knees, not weak on the heart. He raised the blade, let it tremble and tighten, and struck her in the head.
A breath released, a heart that soared with something he could only call guilt.
—
When it rained, the bodies smelled awful. Wet and sloppy and full of rotted flesh and wriggling maggots. When they stood in the sun for days and days on end, blistering and falling apart in the summer heat, the bodies smelled awful.
If you lived on the edges of hordes long enough, you grew used to the awful potency.
—
“Don’t you know it’s dangerous?” Wei Ying snapped, bitterly.
It wasn’t. It was just upstairs. They had cleared that months ago, way way way back. He knew it wasn’t dangerous up there, not really, but his brain was telling him it was.
Wen Qing just looked at him. She really looked, too, and it made him feel sick. He hated it so much. He hated being seen. He hated being known. Like this, specifically, because he got mean and got confused and he refused to eat and refused to let anyone leave sometimes. Wen Qing normally convinced him otherwise. He always felt bad afterwards. He felt bad now, too.
But Wen Qing agreed with him, patiently, like walking someone through a medical procedure.
“Yes,” She said, patiently, and she sounded exhausted. “I know it’s dangerous, Wei Ying.” She had been treating Granny for a mild cold that had turned into something worse, and it was a concern to all of them. But Wen Qing stood strong. She frowned at him, “But we need to get supplies from the next floor, and we can’t do that if you keep us here.”
He swallowed. “I don’t want you to get lost.”
“I won’t,” Wen Qing replied, very easily, and she wiped her hands on her skirts—white, smudged over the years with blood or mud or whatever it was. But it was clean. They all knew it was as clean as anyone would ever get.
Wei Ying didn’t believe her.
He wanted to, really, but he was bitter and exhausted and he was hungry. He had bitten his lips until they bled, and the dried horse meat from earlier had made his lips sting with all its salt. He felt bad that they had to kill their horse. She had been such a lovely creature, truly, but his life surrounded the cages and the crooning sounds of crows and dying birds. He did not want his people to be dying things. He needed them to stay alive, very alive, and it was hard to believe anything when he couldn’t fucking think.
“Yeah?” He asked, expression tight.
“Yeah,” The doctor insisted again, voice straight, words cutting in deep. She reached out, and he flinched away—she didn’t mention it—her hand came to his shoulder, and she frowned at him. “Wei Ying,” she said, kindly, “I will not get lost, there is no one upstairs. Just spiders and dust, and the storage room with acetaminophen.”
“I can get it, Wen Qing,” The man shook his head, and he peeled himself away from her touch. His shoulders rose up to his cheeks, hunched, and he only tasted bile. “You should just stay here with Granny.”
“Granny will be fine without me,” She said flatly.
“With you,” The patriarch added, strangely desperate, because Wei Ying was ill but not in the way anyone else was, and it made him feel useless. “She’ll be super safe with you, jie, so it’s probably better if I go upstairs and get you what you need.” It was easier, in a way, back when life hadn’t turned into a zombie-corroded nightmare. Your loved ones dead, flinging like rats and scrap heaps. But this was not a movie. He wasn’t someone who could fix the planet. He wouldn’t even know how to start. Kill them all, he thought pointlessly. Don’t let anyone infect each other. Don’t infect your people. You’ll kill them.
“Wei Ying,” Wen Qing asked, simply, “Is this a brain thing?”
He paused.
She paused too, intelligent and wise and too observant. Sometimes he wanted to scream at her. He never did. He just hit his tongue and scrubbed his skin with spare steel wool and any water they could afford to spare. “Or,” she muttered, tiredly, “Are you actually scared that something is up there?”
Irrationality or logistics or—
“Both,” He informed her,the half-truth right off his tongue. Barbed, too tight, he was too much. “Sorry,” a stupid apology, “I don’t want anyone to get hurt. Granny is already sick. I don’t want anyone else to catch it.”
The doctor stared at him, hands at her hips again. “Yeah.”
The candle at the median post—a small desk that had been dragged from one of the hospital rooms into this specific hall, flickered lamely and offered limited light. It barely illuminated Wen Qing’s face. But it flowed, gave enough golden shine to illumines their gritty faces. Like a bad film scene, except Wei Ying was ugly and Wen Qing looked like she would be last woman standing.
(He hoped her family would remain with her, too.)
“Really,” Wei Ying said again, slowly, and he was nervous and keyed up and he wanted to vomit his breakfast but it would be a waste of food, and he had gone through a lot of trouble to get Spaghetti-o’s from the nearby store just for him and Yuan. “I mean it,” He tasted bile, so much of it, and it was filling his mouth. “You’re plenty capable, but I don’t really… I don’t want to wait for you to come back. It’s scary.”
No one ever came back. When they left him, they left. And he didn’t want anyone else to vanish. That was why he was scared. That was why he was fucking terrified, why his brain screamed at him, why Wei Ying’s section of the hospital was sectioned off with fake crime scene tape and a bunch of empty candle glasses—no wax left—and a door that was always locked, something always blocking the entry way when he wasn’t in it.
To keep the infection in. To keep all his grossness, his illness, in one contained place. So no one else got sick. Because even though, logically, scientifically, they wouldn’t get sick from him, he couldn’t risk it. Wei Ying didn’t want to risk exposing them to his ruin if he could help it.
Hence the separate hallway and corridor, just for him.
“So you want us to wait on you?” She asked, flatly, and damn her and her logic. He frowned. “Like we have to rely on you, for everything, including going upstairs?”
“Well,” He hedged, then went silent.
Wen Qing sighed, really sighed, and she looked away from him to the worn-out wallpaper on the walls. Cartoon animals running like a runaway field trip in the zoo, because this was the entry point to the children’s ward, which Wei Ying had struggled for months to actually clean out. It felt like a violation. It hurt. He didn’t want to kill any of the kids. They had looked real, just really hurt, and he had gagged and sobbed and cried like a baby after taking out an entire group-room. He had cried so hard that Wen Qing put a hand on the back of his neck and pulled him into a hug, his infections oozing into her pristine apocalypse-survival mentality.
(Not really. Because Wei Ying was ill, up in the head, right, that was what all his therapists told him. He couldn’t actually infect people.)
“I get it,” Wen Qing said, tiredly, and she was looking at him again. She stretched her hands out, though, like a widespread motion that accompanied her entire hippy-dippy baloney doctor speech. “You’re scared. You’ve never had anyone to come home to. You don’t want to lose any of us,” she looked him right in the eyes, “And that’s okay. But we will die if we only rely on you.”
“I’m,” He struggled to form the words. He wrapped his arms around himself, scraped his nails up and down his sleeveless arms, because he cut the torn sleeves off this sweater back when he was young and stupid. “I’m the patriarch. You’re a doctor,” he felt evil, maybe he was, and his teeth hurt. “You shouldn't be doing supply runs.”
“Upstairs,” She reminded him chillily. “All I need is the fever medication, upstairs, stored in room two-hundred-three.”
Wei Ying nodded, weak. “Yeah.”
He was trying to convince himself to stop being a total stupid fuck all. He was trying to stop himself from yelling, from pushing Wen Qing out of the hall and locking this corridor’s doors. Because dead kids used to live in here, and the necessary stairs to get to the room they needed was behind him, somewhere down the hall, and they would need a flashlight because none of the windows in any of the rooms granted the hallway much illumination. But he looked in the dark, stared down the narrow tunnel of hospital doom, and he got dizzy and he got ill. He saw faces. He heard his sister cry.
Then he thought he was dead and worms were eating him and he sobbed again, all over, and someone often found him biting his palm or hitting his head with a hand as he pleaded with ghosts, fake, not real. None of the older Wens got involved, really, because they saw him losing his mind and knew better than to scare him. But sometimes the Wen siblings would try and help. Wen Ning didn’t touch him, didn’t come in contact, but whenever he did—it was worse than Wen Qing’s contact, because Wen Ning had no immunity at all. He wasn’t a doctor, so how could he defend himself against Wei Ying’s depression and oozing mentality, how could he?
She waited a beat. “You remember it, right?”
“Yeah,” He said, uncomfortably, because he didn’t know why he put the important stuff upstairs when he should have kept it all down here, on this floor, where everyone actually lived. The kitchen was down here, too, and so was the working bathroom. And it led right outside to the garden, too. But—
“It means you can come with me,” And her words were stiff, like her shoulders, but she took a step forwards and pulled her singular flashlight out of her pocket.
Wei Ying looked at her.
“Oh, god,” He said, tightly, and she waited for him to turn on his heel and vomit onto the linoleum floor. He gagged, retched, and his food came up in chunks and gross piecases and the tears burned, made him hitch. Her hand came to the top of his spine, her thumb pressed in. He gagged more, felt everything change and shift. He would infect her.
Oh, god, no.
“It’s fine,” She told him. “It’s just your brain scaring you. We can find something up there for you. There are no undead, just us.” And she sounded so calm, so much better than him.
—
“Have you always been alone?” Wen Ning asked him, and it wasn’t completely out of the blue—it was expected, actually, because Wei Ying and him talked a lot anyway.
They discussed all kinds of things, from comic books to family to music to archery to kites and video games and anime and other shows like Bones or NCIS. Anything to stay sane when the world ended and you couldn’t call your long-distance best friend, he imagined. Wen Ning had always been with his family, though they used to be a larger group. Apparently they had been with their cousins, too, the richer ones. But they split off a while back, way before they even met Wei Ying.
“Nah,” He shook his head, smiling a little. “I stuck with this one kid before,” Wei Ying mumbled into the dark, looking at the bloody floor with a blank face. “Their name was Mo Xuanyu. They were pretty cool.”
It was an ugly floor.
Wen Ning blinked, “Yeah?”
“Yeah,” The patriarch breathed out, wet and awful, and his eyes were watering all of a sudden and he felt like a piece of shit. He should have fought harder back then. He should have fought like hell. He should have let the zombie bite him instead. “Mo Xuanyu was younger than me. Like, two years or so. They liked video games and cosplay.”
“Cosplay is cool,” Wen Ning said quietly, so quietly. “I always wanted to cosplay Sailor Moon.”
“You’d be a great Sailor Moon,” Wei Ying nodded. “Mo Xuanyu wanted to cosplay the joker, from, like—Persona Five? I don’t know the game name.” Tears rolled down his face, and his heart hammered, started pounding at his sternum and lungs and insides. Red, so red—his friend’s guts had been a similar color, being gutted by angry men, dead men, crying for Wei Ying to run. Run! Please! Please run, Wei Ying, run, go, run! Over and over.
Wen Ning was kind.
Sometimes he could be too kind, and it meant Wei Ying never knew what was happening. He struggled to comprehend kindness when it came in a neatly-packaged box with yellow wrapping.
“What happened?” The guy asked, quietly, and Wei Ying blinked the water out of his eyes and wiped his face with the back of his glove.
“Died,” He said, simply. “A bad run in. I wasn’t able to get him out in time.” It came out like an engine noise, something raw and ragged and sputtering out. He wasn’t sure how to explain it. Wei Ying had traveled with that kid for only a little, only a few months. Blistering heat to chillier autumn. And then the inevitable happened. Then Mo Xuanyu died.
“I’m sorry,” Wen Ning said, and he sounded like he meant it.
He sounded like he felt bad, like he understood. He probably did. They all have lost people. This was a cliche apocalypse with no buildup, virtually nothing to explain the awfulness going on, and everything else just turned into mush.
So much mush.
“Yeah,” Wei Ying breathed out, uncomfortably, because he still dreamed of that young fifteen year old who had busted ribs and fucked up bones and a wobbly smile. “But they were cool. They didn’t do anything stupid on purpose. We both were foster kids,” he nodded along to his own words, “So we got along. And they tried so hard to take care of me, right, but they were the one who needed to be taken care of.”
“Everyone needs to be taken care of once in a while,” Wen Ning said quietly, very quietly, and he pushed the warehouse door open with a wary face. His words traced over mountains, traced over everything. “They probably saw how hard you worked to survive.”
(He wished it was different.)
“Maybe,” He said, and he dropped the topic. It was his own fault for mentioning it. He should have just carried on with this job, collecting the pallets of grain that Wen Qing requested. “Yeah.”
—
The food was shitty. The world was shitty. For fuck’s sake, evrything was shitty, and Wei Ying wondered why he still fought to live when everything was this shitty. Maybe it was because he wasn’t on his meds consistently anymore—he was rationing them, not taking them twice a day. He didn’t know how long they’d last him. Shit. God. Yiling was locked up and quiet. The zombies moved slowly and without a purpose until someone made too big of a noise, wore something too colorful, moved too fast.
Calling them zombies was the stupidest thing Wei Ying ever thought. He hated calling them zombies, because it made them a fictional thing. Something out of a comic or a movie or a book.
It was stupid.
The undead were fucking stupid.
Wei Ying watched from rooftops. He had a collection of things. He was alone, most of the time. It meant he didn’t have to share his meager supplies or his limited food, and didn’t have to ration everything into near non-existent portions. His groups never lasted long, not when they saw him as a wretched kid and he saw them as untrustworthy adults. When their hands lingered, so did his knife, and they didn’t like that. He didn’t like them.
He split up, got lost, and wandered.
Sometimes wandering was better than staying behind in old warehouses and apartment complexes. Sometimes finding corpses with their heads bashed open was better than staying where the fresh undead could rip him apart.
One young teenager, surviving alone. This kind of thing would never have worked out in the movies. He would be dead by now, surely. Kids like him were careless and uncoordinated. They lived just because they took one look at death and said that’s not good enough for me despite the real world being a mess of skeletons, walking corpses, and traitorous people who followed no laws in the absence of what used to be normal.
So things were shitty.
He counted the days. He counted the hours.
His phone had long since died, the screen cracked down the center in an ugly mark, but sometimes he would pretend to turn it on and call his sister, or even text his foster-mother and hope she would not be angry at a message so late at night.
Sometimes he would just pretend. Maybe he ran off for the night, maybe his medications were no longer working, maybe he was just lucid dreaming instead of dealing with insomnia. He liked to pretend, to count what he has done and document it by any means necessary. He wrote it down with caulk in the old church building, took it off the blackboard after killing the horde of zombies inside, and then wrote down everything he could think of in Mandarin and then in English and then in his oh-so rusty Cantonese.
The world was shitty. He stole prepackaged rations from a bunch of people who tried to use him as zombie bait. He learned not to trust strangers more than a few minutes, however long it took to win a fight against a herd or cluster of walking corpses with blood-filled mouths and scar-crossed faces.
He hid in random places, locked himself inside—cleared roads and opened fire against anything he thought would not shriek and attack further walkers into the area. He tried. He really, really tried. It made him ache. It made him cry.
But Wei Ying lived. He could live like that. He was not afraid of living like that, you know. He could do it.
—
It was approximately June fourteenth when the first signal flare went out.
Yiling had been a ghost town, locked up and strung together with steel walls and broken shrapnel. Buildings crumbling, bodies thrust into the rubble and into the cold and so very dead earth.
Wei Ying had been the one to build the first walls. They had been shobby, and butchered, and covered in his and other strangers’ blood, but the infected folk had walked right at it.
Deer in the headlights.
He had stolen his foster mother’s car and drove it over a herd of seven of them, had cracked skulls with a bat he found in the abandoned sports store down by Cabela’s. He had been young and stupid and so desperate he had been willing to cut his palm to draw the runners close to him, to get them to leave his would-be neighbors alone.
He had made the walls, had piled shit up high, had dragged corpses and bashed their heads in as many times as possible. Some people along the years had helped.
Two old men—one bitten and not yet turned, another with a missing eye that had been gouged out during the original infection—had stayed with him long enough to rebuild the gates of one neighborhood. They had boarded up two apartment buildings and set another on fire.
One of them had taught him how to drive their truck.
When that vehicle died, and the men died with it, Wei Ying had stolen the parts and junk within the car’s hood and trunk. Tore up the old leather seats, steal and repurpose everything he could. Bulk cutters, to snap apart the metal roof. Popped two tires early on, wrangle the damned car far enough to get the rubber off of the metal part so he could use that shit later.
At one point, he had broken his leg trying to run with a baby. Some random mother was left behind, stuck in her car, and had broken her window in to shove the crying thing out. She called the baby baobao, and told Wei Ying to kill her before she turned. He shot her in the head with the pistol he stole from a looter three months back, then stumbled down the street in search of his safe house—somewhere to go, to hide a sobbing mess of a human being.
He had been sixteen when the apocalypse hit. Not the apocalypse specifically, but the sickness and virus and infection.
All that, he lived through.
There had been groups of people in Yiling, all seeing him—this one lonely kid, the same kid you would have seen alone in diners, the same kid that you would called a delinquent and a troublemaker and a burden—build and create walls. No food, no supplies, and rarely any guns.
Just a boy with black hair that was wild and long, and a few miscellaneous items.
A flashlight, or a box of matches. A bat. A pistol from a woman who had gotten too close to the dead and got bitten. A knife from another, a pocket-knife, a steak knife, a crossbow from Cabela’s shooting and hunting range, an angry looking stick he sharpened with a hatchet that had snapped apart on his palms after cracking down on a zombie’s spinal cord. A thumbtack, a nail, a hammer. A screwdriver that was crooked and nearly snapped in half. A bunch of other things. His heart. His long since empty pill bottle that he stared at with anger. His broken phone that he couldn’t call anyone on.
He lived like that for a few years, got his shit together long enough to be called a nickname. A running gag in the ghost town, the origin of the undead. People call it a mass graveyard, a dead man’s town.
Wei Ying grew bitter with time.
Three months after the first flare signal, another struck off. He sought after the elderly couple who shot that damned light off—angry, haunting. A horde of undead had gone after them before he could get them safely, before he could tell them off for making so much noise, for making so much light—they died in minutes, turned to death, turned into yet another bit of infected souls for Yiling. He hadn’t been able to crush the feeling of insufferable hatred at their soulless eyes, empty, useless.
(A hallucination from the corner of his eye told him it was his fault. Wei Ying tried to ignore it.)
The third flare happened when Wei Ying was seventeen. It had been in the middle of October, when the trees dropped their leaves and the undead roamed aimlessly in the soon to be frosty roads. He killed the deserter who shot it off, who grabbed the undead’s attention. The warehouse the fourteen of them had been staying in got overrun within an hour.
He made it out alive with three others.
Yiling had always been small. A gated community. A small town with a small population. A bunch of scrappy teens, sick teens, and then the firework community. People roaming in and out of Yiling’s streets like a tourist town, like it was more than the last place people went because they had nowhere else to go. It was a ghost town for a reason. Now it was a dead town, and the people knew him. They had to, he imagined, because he took the cars and ran over the dead—he made things work. He bared his teeth and poured gasoline and refused to use cars, let alone leave the confines of the city, so he took the canisters and made the undead burn away, rotten and souring. Wei Ying used to be a kid. He wasn’t so young anymore. No one said he was a kid, anymore.
Wei Ying was the boy who took in others, did not leave them for death, did not run from the infected like all the others, and built the walls after they were torn down by angry corpses hungry for blood and guts and everything else inside people’s rotten little bodies. Torn and cold and blackened out by ash and spit.
He was the boy who grew to be the man.
That was how everyone saw it.
Years after the damned flares went off, Wei Ying was known as the Patriarch. He built the walls. He killed robbers and smugglers and thieves. He killed the undead, forced them under his boot, and made it known that those who entered his city would not leave it. People knew him. They had to know him, goddamn it.
When he was twenty five, the sixteenth flare was shot up into the sky—bursting with red and yellow and gold and crimson poppers—and this one, against everything done to the city, was actually seen.
—
Wei Ying had cleared out the hospital slowly. It had taken an unfortunately long time.
It was further into the northern parts of Yiling, trapped along a giant hill, only one block down by the cemetery. It was probably the best place to call home, to call base. Safe enough. Easily one of the most crowded places, so onlookers would see its rugged shape and assume it was crawling with the dead. Wei Ying had looked at it and thought it was perfect for the post-apocalypse status they would soon face. He clawed it out, dragged and dragged bodies, hungry and haunting, and made a home for himself.
He gathered a group of people he trusted, shook and shook and shook while they staggered to fill every gap he could not.
A baby was with them. A child, only a few years younger than him came next, black hair and red eyes—the boy had taken out the contacts with a sob when Wei Ying whispered to him about the risk of losing his sight due to infection. A doctor, and her little brother who was sick but a sturdy soul, desperate to succeed and survive, to defend what was left of home. Because this was how it worked: they had to stick together. Wei Ying tried not to snap at them too much. He didn’t want them to think he was some kind of fool.
(Maybe he was. He didn’t know. He was tired and staticky and faded in and out like bad waters. He didn’t know. He could hear his mom cry all the time, and she had died way before the undead came to life.)
There was a granny, older than time itself, who cradled the baby and hushed him when he cried. She couldn’t walk fast but she could keep them all quiet. An old man, then, who wore his silver hair in a long bun and called himself Uncle Four—twisting around with a long machete every time Wei Ying approached. He struggled to know the difference between dead and alive, too.
The following were two middle-aged men, all of the same family. One cut off the other’s arm so the bite would not infect the rest of him. The other, an electrician who helped get the power running again. Then a woman who came in with a fever and infected stomach wound, not bitten by any zombie, but not safe to run. She had taught them all to cook and sew. She was a damn good shot with a gun, and went absolutely feral once she realized that Wei Ying had raided the hunting store all those years ago.
The hospital was home.
Wei Ying took people in and saved them, let them loose or told them to stay loyal here, stay clean, stay close. Sanctuary inside. You do not need to get supplies, I will, I will do all of it. Just stay here and get things humane again. Wei Ying didn’t want anyone to die. So he kept them in one place. He got it covered. He did. The man ached most days. He did not tell anyone this.
When they died, sick or dead from a supply run, following after the patriarch, pledging companionship because how could they let this young boy go and do everything alone—Wei Ying took their bodies back home, buried them in the little cove of a garden that the hospital had on its inside. He didn’t want them to be possessed by any devilish fuckery—nothing unnatural, nothing claiming to be a natural cordance. He wanted them to rest. He really, really wanted them to rest. So he buried them, shot them in their heads for good measure, and made sure the dirt and worms ate them whole.
A circular motion, an outdoor garden and an inside one. Home. Rest.
So he lived, so he fought.
The electricity in the building soon crackled to life, the people became close. The young boy with red-contacts had lost his mother to the virus. The baby had been left at the original warehouse, all those years back—he had saved the baby when he was so young, shot the mother in her car, and found a group willing to take the poor thing.
“You came all this way, found your way back to me,” He had said, all straight faced and wondrous when he saw the baby again, flashes of pain from the resounding bang of a memory from a distant past.
Sanctuary inside the hospital. He worked, he flayed himself open, and the undead seemed to ignore him most days—he bled open, he cut them down, he snarled like a dog. They listened to him, sharp and hungry, and followed him like mangy beasts when he culled them away like cattle in a dairy farm. Because he was dying, too. Because his foster mother was right, he was weird, he was something really damned. Wei Ying liked to think she saw him in every corpse that tried to bite her, but he didn’t know. He didn’t know where any of the Jiangs went.
Like this: gun to their heads, never to his own. Survival. Survival. Survival.
Wei Ying had learned so long ago how to do all of it.
—
Wei Ying was pretty sure the undead only listened to him because he was like. Cool. Or whatever.
Hell if he knew. He didn’t actually know why any corpses followed him but didn’t bite. He didn’t know why they paused in their motions, why he could press past them with ease on certain days or have them try and eat him alive on others. Wei Ying had never been bit before, so it couldn’t have been some weird hocus-pocus fuckery, you know? He wasn’t the main character of The Walking Dead, or from The Last of Us. He wasn’t even baddass enough. He wasn’t Carl fucking Grimes or whatever. He had no immunity.
But the undead didn’t kill him. They tried, yes. They tried to kill and eat and devour everyone else. They had a mob mentality. Fuck. Wei Ying didn’t even know if the walking corpses had minds or if they were barely there. A shadow of humanity? Of personality? Maybe?
He didn’t know.
So the conclusion that he came to was this: he was just fucking better than everyone else. He had cheat codes or something. He was literally the main character.
(Can’t deny what was literally happening to him.)
The undead pushed past him. He pushed past them. It was some kind of fever dream he wanted to wake up from. It was something sickening and isolating, because he didn’t have a group to talk to, couldn’t find his foster family, and his birth parents had been dead since way before the outbreak ever occurred. He missed his sister’s soup, her warm hands, her gentle smile. He missed his brother and all their play-fights. Hell, he even missed sleeping in the attic on certain nights because sleeping down the hall from his foster parents seemed unbearable. All of it was bearable now. He would choose it if he could, pluck it from God’s hands and take it willingly, no matter how disgusting.
But he couldn’t go back in time, and Wei Ying wasn’t a miracle or anything like that. He wasn’t a doctor or a scientist. It was almost embarrassing how many things Wei Ying had gone through, but never kept. He returned, but never finished things.
Always unable to stay focused for long.
Fuck, really—
He was a rundown kid who had bounced foster houses and switched clubs and hobbies all the time. Soccer during one year, art and music the next year, then for awhile he was in computer programming—then he went to track and field with his brother, over and over, and then Jiang Cheng and him both went into archery during their first year of high school. Wei Ying dabbled in more art and pottery classes with his sister, though she leaned into culinary arts and he leaned into burning his mouth off with chili sauce arts, Act IV. He loved the flute. He played it, endlessly, but stopped due to what Yu Ziyuan said about the squeaking.
In the end of the world though, abandoned and alone and angry, he wasn’t sure any of it mattered. His old house was too damaged to be repaired, and he had left the safety of Lotus Pier’s community a long time ago. He hadn’t been anywhere near Yunmeng in forever.
Wei Ying traveled to Yiling, after all. Broken. Angry. Without medication or proper sleep and care. He had been alone for most of it, hot-wiring cars and driving them until there was no gas left. He pretended that he was still taking music classes with that one hot dude who never said anything and yet almost always let Wei Ying ramble like a machine gun—yapping about a million things, meds or not. He pretended to call his brother, sometimes, even saw a roughly shaped Jiang Cheng shadow on certain days when his head hurt the most and he was easily pissed off at the world.
Maybe anyone would be. He wasn’t sure.
—
July was blistering.
It reminded Wei Ying of summers, of traveling. Summer vacation in America, for example. Lots of cram school and studying in China, lots of studying in this area. For him. For every other foster kid, ever, as long as their foster families made them, he assumed.
But thinking about summer and old times made him think about watermelon rinds and popsicles and lotus root soup and pork roasts and fireworks and video games and archery with his brother, cooking with his sister, painting in art class with that one kid—something-Huaisang—who was alone beyond his older brother—shared schools, boarding, big tributes and competitions and meet-ups with other school teams and clubs.
He grieved.
And it came in pieces, most days, because Wei Ying was not coherent. He missed home. But home was way back in Yunmeng, and it was too far away to travel alone, or even in a vehicle. Hell, they didn’t even have a horse anymore.
He hadn’t seen a good animal in a while. Sometimes sick ones wandered through the streets, but even so—that wasn’t something to be proud of. Most were bitten by the undead and then they got sick or whatever. Rabies? He really wasn’t sure what happened to the animals. Most of them just laid down and fell over and died with rot littering their bitten pieces.
July was hot.
The sun beat down on everything, and all the walking corpses smelled terrible because of it. Like cooking, but not with his foster sister, no. Like something was burning, more like, and Wei Ying dreamt of death and sewers and the bad boys at his school who used to always invite him to the skatepark with them.
He wished he had gone. He never did. Those kids were probably dead now, he figured, so Wei Ying grieved that too.
There wasn’t anything to do when the heat got this bad. It was humid, but if he took the dirt pathways behind the hill, he would find older spots to mope in. It wouldn’t be so wise. He didn’t want to leave Mo Xuanyu alone, didn’t want to think too hard about grief. But he did want to grieve. His old therapist used to say stuff like grieving is coping and is important to the healing process, but that motherfuvker wasn’t here anymore—probably off and died like everyone else—so Wei Ying was left to gnaw on his fingers and nails instead.
So Wei Ying stood under the large makeshift awning on this specific roof, sighing to himself. He was seventeen. The world was mostly ending, if it hadn’t already ended completely a few years back, when the infection actually started to show up.
The awning was just a large tarp that was connected to one of those stolen public pool umbrellas, the ones with the fancy independent stands.
“Are you okay?” Mo Xuanyu asked, quietly.
Wei Ying glanced at the kid, frowning. Mo Xuanyu and him looked similar with black hair and pale skin, though the stranger was skinnier and looked sick half the time. Wei Ying just got house-crazy and ended up doing things that made others abandon him. That and the whole abandonment thing. And hallucinations, which he was pretty sure Mo Xuanyu didn’t have. But maybe the don’t leave me all alone thing was something the guy had. Wei Ying wasn’t going to ask.
“Yeah,” He mumbled, his mouth dry. “Just thinking.”
He patted his legs, his hips, and finally his pockets. He felt his pocket knife, and a pack of almost-gone mint gum he saved for moments where he needed to ground himself. He didn’t have any water left, and the only place nearby that would actually have something had probably already been raided.
“Thirsty?” The other teen mumbled, and they were only fifteen, and their left arm was completely busted up and they had pretty bad bruising on his ribs.
Wei Ying hadn’t been willing to leave him behind in the fucked-up grocery store, which was like five blocks away from this specofoc old tailor shop. Wei Ying had picked up some of the leather and shoved it into his traveling duffel bag, a collection of small items. But Mo Xuanyu hadn’t fit into any kind of duffel or trash bag, so Wei Ying had picked them up bridal style and carried them out of the broken glass and to this place—which was high enough up that they both could see things in the streets surrounding this corner block.
“Yeah,” He said, shortly, and then he turned on his feet and walked to the middle of the awning, sitting down across from Mo Xuanyu’s sleeping bag. Or, well, Wei Ying’s sleeping bag that he had laid out for the younger person.
“Here,” Mo Xuanyu offered, and they dragged a nearly empty water bottle out from their own bag. “It’s the bottle I have, but it’s something.”
“You should keep it,” Wei Ying disagreed, politely, and refused to take the plastic water bottle from the kid’s hand. “You’re injured, so you need it more.” He didn’t want to touch anything alive because they always got sick afterwards, and he ever knew what to do with himself when the people he began growing close to got sick. It made him crazier, he was pretty sure.
“I might die,” The kid mumbled, again, and they kept the bottle outstretched because they were an honest thing like that, and it made Wei Ying nauseous. “So you should have it.”
Mo Xuanyu had also been a foster kid left behind. It was pretty shitty. Or, you know, maybe not left behind exactly, but presumed dead after a bad run in and they could never find their family or mom after that. But here they were: no more glass debris in their skin, because Wei Ying had taken off the kid’s shirt and plucked each shard out with his emergency tweezers he stole from a veterinary office a few weeks back.
Wei Ying frowned, sharply, “Don’t say that.”
“I might,” They repeated, awkwardly, and shook the bottle a little. The plastic name thing had long since torn away, leaving only but the crinkly plastic. “So take it.”
“No,” Wei Ying repeated. “You should have it, seriously. I’m okay like this.” He rocked back and forth, then side to side, and shook his head. His shoulders shuddered and he twitched without his own permission and it made him feel like a dumb thing, a really dumb thing. “I’ve been thirsty before, right, so I’ll be okay. You drink that when you feel like it, ‘kay?”
“Please,” Mo Xuanyu tried, and they sounded very earnest.
“No,” He said, again, again, again.
Mo Xuanyu made a wounded sound, and they set the crinkly and loud plastic bottle down on the empty roofing space next to them. They licked their lips, dry, barely wetted them. “Fine,” They groaned, at last, but it was more of a rasp than an actual sound of guttural dismay.
“Yeah, like that,” Wei Ying shook his head a few times, clearing his vision. “You should probably try and sleep.” July was blistering. The heat was fucking awful, shit smelled awful, and he was probably going to be dehydrated. It was going to be hell going to the bathroom. He didn’t even want to think about what he was going to use as toilet paper.
“Can’t sleep,” They said tiredly. “Hurts too much.”
Wei Ying blinked at them again, at their sticky and oily black hair that clung to their forehead and neck, and the to their bare torso which was colored in pale yellows and then bright blues and deep navy hues. “Right,” He frowned, empathetic. “Do you want more tylenol?”
“No,” Mo Xuanyu denied, because they knew it would just make their stomach burn more. Neither of them had eaten since last night, and that had been nearly eighteen hours ago. “Maybe just talk.”
“You want me to talk to you?” The seventeen year old asked, quietly. “Stories and stuff?” He squinted in the burning light, smelled nothing but dust and caked dirt and death. But Mo Xuanyu was looking at him, exhausted and trusting and hopeful. And Wei Ying wasn’t heartless. He was just sick, that was all, and that didn’t stop him from talking. It wouldn’t stop him from talking.
They nodded, weakly. “Yeah.”
“Sure,” Wei Ying said, kindly, because he could tell some stories and it would probably be fine. “Like bedtime stories. But for the afternoon.” He smiled, dryly. “And for the survivors of the apocalypse.”
Mo Xuanyu smiled at him, too, dry and achy. Wei Ying started talking.
—
“Where are you heading?” Someone asked him as he stretched out in the main lobby upstairs, his shoes laced up and his jacket firmly wrapped around him.
The smell of instant coffee pushed past his nose. Down the hall, in a locked room where the keys remained both in his and every other adults’ and a child’s pockets, there was a loud laugh that made Wei Ying feel a tad bit less stressed. Just enough to breathe, to look up and stare at his onlooker.
“I’m going to go down by the south border,” Wei Ying muttered, pressing his hands into his thighs and dragging his thumbs into the loops of his jeans. “Saw a flare. All the corpses started moving down in that direction, so—”
“Don’t get yourself killed,” The woman said dryly, and she ran a hand down her face before scowling at him. Her eyes blistered. “If I find out you got yourself murdered, I’ll drag you back to life myself and make you work the generator until it fries you to death for a second time.”
She didn’t mean it.
Maybe,about finding his body and dragging it back here, but not about the frying thing. She knew better than to play Doctor and Frankenstein. She wasn’t that crazy. He was, though, a little bit.
“I won’t,” He rolled his eyes, an uncomfortable feeling settling in his gut. He shrugged, loose lipped and loose tongued. “If I’m lucky, it’s probably just someone from the deserter grounds. You know how it is—if they can’t kill us, they’lll kill themselves.” Wei Ying had survived on his own for a long time. He was not worried about death after all these years. The hospital lights above him flickered.
She looked unconvinced, pressing the mug to her lips and taking a long sip. She was always like this, blunt and haunting and—he smiled at her, brightly colored.
His friend turned away after a long moment.
Welcome to the apocalypse: here, your friends would still betray you in your times of need. Don’t smile when it’s early in the evening and your friend is on the last box of coffee you all have. Fuck.
He pushed on anyway.
—
“What part of stay home was not clear?” The man hissed, tiredly, dragging the child into his hip and placing both hands on their shoulders. Bright eyes turned up at him, through the melting darkness of late evening.
The undead loved bright and loud things. That was why most of Yiling had turned into nocturnal pricks who lived alone or lived in giant swarms, just like the dead. Hordes, you called them, picked at them with guns and knives and bats you gave names for the thrill. The purpose. The slaughter of survival because you would be a classic folklore zombie if you did not win your battle.
“I wanted to see the lights,” His boy whispered to him, tugging at his sleeve. “Please. They’re really cool.”
Wei Ying swallowed thickly. He hated this kind of thing. Yuan wasn’t stupid, no, but it wasn’t like Wei Ying told him everything about the nuances of apocalypse survival. “The flares aren’t lights,” He explained, sharply.
Watery eyes met his, but no hitch of breath came after.
In the apocalypse, you cannot cry for things, you cannot make excess noise. He dropped his hands, signing weakly. No fireworks out here, bud. His kid looked at him like a bug had just been crushed underneath his stolen combat boots.
The ward’s gates were still closed.
The hospital garden was cleaned out, and no walkers had gotten in. He could just take the kid back right now and go off on his own like he had planned before the moon went to the middle of the sky.
Hell could be raised if the others learned that the child had left the base just because he trusted the patriarch to bring him back safely. Just because of some dumb lights—once we had something called fireworks, I promise, they were so pretty—and then the smile that latched onto his spine because this boy was so young, too young, and—will I ever get to see fireworks, baba—who knew.
“Please?” His boy asked, just a whisper. His small hands reached for the gun Wei Ying kept in his right pocket, and the man paused with an outstretched arm.
Noises crackled a long way away, but he could see the smoke of a fire, smell it in the air. Dumb strangers. Dumb people. He was so sick and tired of having to go out and cull humanity like it was cattle just because they did not know how to fight the undead that now lived on in their places.
“Stay with me,” Wei Ying said firmly, and slipped the gun out to hand it to the child. “Don’t make noise, and do exactly what I say. Don’t hesitate.” Young but not naive. Never naive, not in an apocalypse, not in this tense situation that they would call their own. His hands shook, and he signed a whirlwind of orders, a quick and butchered term for follow and then another for obey. Dark eyes met bubbly and sad ones.
“Uhuh,” The boy nodded quietly, fumbling with the gun but holding it exactly as any other would. “I won’t hesitate.” He swallowed. “I know.”
—
Wei Ying glared at the flickering of the lamp, already settling in amongst the bodies on the ground.
The camp was fresh. It was new. The strangers who got in had closed the gates after them, like gentlemen, but had decided that they could get away with light under a full moon and not get caught. The herd of undead stumbled upon them only a few hours ago, and the fireplace before him was raw and wilting. The strangers who had arrived carried guns, and wore bright colors—a bad decision, really, because the undead in this city were terrible creatures and would follow anything that was different then their own flesh.
The most annoying part of this was that Wei Ying, admittedly, did not realize people were in the walls until he heard the random gunshots.
Which meant he and his kid now had to improvise.
Next to him, Yuan stared with wide eyes. His little fingers were too small to hold the gun right, but he was a good shot—he had always been a good shot. Wei Ying had made sure of that.
The dark consumed them, the night angry, the breaths of strangers showing up in the city before the damned sunlight. Yiling was uneventful. The dead did not move, they did not swarm. They clung to the gates where guts spilled, where Wei Ying had strung up the defected bodies of traitors and people who had harmed the community. He knew the way around out here. He knew where the corpses would lay, how they would react to fresh meat. He was no god and no devil, but if his boy got bit tonight, there would be more problems then the strangers dying in his home.
He looked away from the infected body on the ground, still moaning and groaning. His knife was position just at its jugular, twisting so close to flesh, rotten and grey with time. When the zombie moaned again, its arms disconnected from its still wriggling body, Wei Ying dug in deep with his blade and sliced upwards. The blood splattered over the skin, an ugly display of something that resembled a pomegranate’s inside.
The world was long since tainted with this kind of violence. He was already used to it, and Yuan had been raised in it for all of his small life. He still knew of a world where the undead did not walk. He still knew of a world where Yiling had the largest foster kid population, not the largest dead population.
Move left. Follow my lead. He signed, slow and steady. The motion would be seen through the dark as long as his boy was looking at him. The lantern ensured this.
His boy replied after a moment, a single nod, paired with the sign for safe.
Wei Ying knew what the child meant. Out here, everyone knew. If you lived long enough to be part of this little community, the outcasts, the ones who walked with the dead and whispered with blood glimmering between every tooth, you would know what it meant. Be safe. Stay safe. Find safety. There were so many variations of that symbol, the tone used, the way someone would smile or scowl or shake their head and offer that single sign as a means of communication. As a means of everything they had left to offer.
He gestured again, moving his knife to hood the blade at a downward angle before mouthing the words if there are guns, you run to Yuan as he stood up.
The nearest corpse locked onto him, smattered and smeared with red and black. It chopped its jaw, clicking old teeth together and moaning. Wei Ying stalked over in the flickering dark, grabbing a hold of the corpse by its hair and pressing his knife into its forehead. It made a shlunking noise, and stuttered where it laid, before going still.
Wen Qing would tell him he should have used the rifle to blow its head off, or the crossbow he had yet to teach Yuan to use. She would critique him for preferring close range when a bunch of new, possibly hostile, and most certainly dangerous people were in Yiling’s center.
His head hurt. Goddamn it. He flexed his hands.
Yuan nodded at him again, before lurching forwards and grabbing the lantern. In a few moments, the forsaken light that most of the community strives to black out was gone.
—
Wen Qing deposited Yuan into Wei Ying’s arms, saying something about parenting and caretaking.
Something.
“Qing-Jie, I’m no good with kids,” Wei Ying was saying, weakly, as Wen Qing deposited a young thing into his arms. He refused to drop the kid, obviously, but his heart was thundering and everything in his head told him to set the kid down before the little thing got infected.
“Nonsense,” She said sharply. “He’s going to be with us, isn’t he? You’re going to have to take care of him like the rest of us.”
“But,” He said, and his mouth was dry. Sickness, fear. Wei Ying could feel his own plague slowly melting into the delicate and unmarred skin of this person, and it scared him, really scared him. He looked at Yuan. “But I,” He looked back up to Wen Qing. “I am really bad with kids. I don’t know anything about them.”
His hands were shaking.
She looked at him for a long moment. Yuan wasn’t complaining or crying yet, which was great, but the little thing had shoved its head into Wei Ying’s shoulder and he was realizing that he must be having an episode of something, right, because he was losing time and his eyes were blurring and his breaths were shallow. Yuan was just a baby, really—not in the literal sense—and Wei Ying didn’t want to infect him.
“I love him, I do,” Wei Ying said, shakily, “But I can’t keep him right now, please.”
“Shit,” Wen Qing cursed, but she took Yuan out of his arms and easily propped the boy up at her hip. She licked her lips, and the awful bruises on her temple and left eye were easily spotted in the light. “Fine.” She looked him up and down. “Is this about your brain again?”
“No,” He lied.
Wen Qing frowned at him.
“Yes,” He confessed, and he wrung his hands together. They were clammy. He looked away from the woman and Yuan. “It’s just, hard, today.”
“Right,” Wen Qing said, slowly. She didn’t tell him he was useless. She didn’t mention his clear stupidity, his irrationality. Hell, she didn’t even tell him to man up or buckle up or just fucking deal with it. She breathed out through her nose, whispered something soothing to Yuan, and then looked back at Wei Ying and gave a tight-lipped smile. “Next time,” she said. “You can just talk to him. You don’t have to hold him.”
“Thank fuck,” Wei Ying deflated rapidly. Does she think I’m lazy? Does she hate me? Does she think I don’t like A-Yuan? He wipes his sweaty hands on his pants, awkward, and rambled, “He’s awesome. I’m just not so awesome. And it scares me.”
“You’re plenty awesome,” She told him, flatly. “It’s just the illness talking.” But her eyes softened, really softened, and she nodded at him. “Take it slow.”
(No slurs, no stipid phrases, no insults—)
“Oh,” He blinked.
—
In the dark, right, shooting at dead people and covering your face with a mask, well—
—
“Goddamn it,” Wei Ying cursed, and the char was all over his hands, and his back hurt from the impact. “This is such fucking shit.”
“Ow,” Yuan said, intelligently, and he brushed the glass off his shoulders with a tightly controlled face. “You said we shouldn't talk like that.”
“Well—I say a lot of shit, don’t I, Yuan?” Wei Ying snapped, angrily, and the boy winced and turned away from the volume in the man’s voice. He tried to reel himself together. He failed. He was angry, so angry, and he wished he had kept Yuan back inside the safety of the hospital where his actual family could keep him safe. He swallowed thickly, breathed in through his nose. “Sorry,” he offered, tenderly, “I’m not mad at you, Yuan.”
His boy looked at him, frowning, “I know.”
“Right,” Wei Ying breathed. He sat up, hunching his shoulders and shoving his face into his hands. “Fuck.”
The world was on fire, and Wei Ying wasn’t a springy rabbit anymore. He wasn’t able to just run around and not be affected. He was a mentally ill adult who didn’t have access to proper food or medical attention, and no amount of meditation or sleep helped him with his bullshit hallucinations or surges of anger. He couldn’t just—throw himself through windows all the time just to avoid death.
But it was for his boy.
This was for the kid that clung to Wei Ying’s leg only a few years ago, back when Wei Ying didn’t leave the safety of the hospital compound every few days.
That was when he helped everyone settle into the anyone’s hospital—cleaning out floors, reornhizning supplies, boarding up rooms and painting on the walls. That was for history, for survival, for minimal human comfort. Because things were hard. Because life was hard. Because everything out here was hard and no one needed to suffer any more than necessary, and Wei Ying was already exhausted, but there was a kid next to him with wide eyes and a scraped chin and a gun in his pocket and a face that screamed I REALLY REALLY FORGIVE YOU. And that made Wei Ying want to cry, like everything else.
“Sorry,” He said again, because he was bad at apologies and shouldn’t be trusted around a little kid, anyway. Everyone was wrong about him. Just because he loved someone didn’t mean he could protect them from his own anger.
“I forgive you,” Yuan agreed easily, and he inched over with his feet—very quietly—and squatted down to hand Wei Ying the gun. His eyes were wide. He swallowed, asked very curiously, “Are we going to make it home in time for breakfast?”
What a good kid.
Wei Ying’s heart spasmed, really thundered, and he felt like a terrible human all over again. He probably was. Okay.
“Yeah,” He promised, just as easily, because he was the adult here and he would make sure Yuan was taken care of. That his kid made it home to the people who could actually manage all of his kid-related development and mind things. “We’ll make it home for breakfast, don’t worry, bud.”
“Ew, bud,” Yuan fake-gagged.
Wei Ying smiled, really weakly. “Yeah,” he shook his head, taking the gun and sliding to his feet. His back throbbed. He hated his life. Holy shit. He took Yuan’s hand, though, squeezed it. “Not the best name for you, Yuan.”
“Yeah,” His boy whispered, and he didn’t let go of Wei Ying’s hand, he just let the man hold it and let the man breathe in the ashy air.
“This is the type of shit we see in movies,” Wei Ying informed his kid with a long sigh, his shoulders throbbing. He squeezed Yuan’s hand, looking around the deserted area with a stylish face that screamed I’m going home. Then he looked back at the reasonably aged kid he called his own, “A badass character gets into a tough situation with their little guy attached at the hip, and they have to figure out how to fix it and make it out alive.”
“I’m not a little guy,” Yuan shook his head, but he was smiling. “And we’ll make it out.”
“Yeah, for sure,” Wei Ying agreed breezily, because he was going to go back to the hospital right now and drop Yuan off with Granny because there was no way he was taking Yuan with him on a damned scavenger hunt. “Hey,” he smiled, “Do you want waffles for breakfast?”
His kid paused, skeptical. “We can do that?”
“Yep,” The patriarch said, and he picked up Yuan in a quick second—the kid barely squealed, more so just kicked a few times in surprise—and yanked the kid against his hip. “So we’re going home to eat.”
“What?” Yuan groaned, quietly, and he smacked Wei Ying’s collarbones. “Why?”
“‘Cause,” He said, very reasonably and very intelligently, because he was very reasonable and very intelligent, “I’m not risking your life for some dumb people in my city.”
—
Wei Ying was pretty sure he was going insane.
Which made perfect sense, obviously, because when you didn’t have your meds and stuff then yeah, you probably went insane. A little. Because the world was ending and so was your stability. And stuff.
But that was a while ago—he had been without his magnificent little prescriptions in years now. He was an adult, for fuck’s sake, and he took care of a group of people. Like, there was no reason for all this blubbery stuff. He should be fine. He should be the most fine, and not at all crazy, and not at all so keyed up over potential passersby. Because Yiling was a ghost town, and dead people were everywhere, and life was crazy, and so was he. And he had been like this for a while. Paranoid. Frantic. Out of his mind.
He tried to cover himself all the time. He tried so hard to be anything but Wei Ying. Half the time, he didn’t even see himself the way everyone else did. Maybe when society fixes itself, We Qing had murmured. Things won’t be so bad. And he had prayed, actually, sitting down with Granny and clasping his hands and thinking to the universe, to the metaphorical and the literal God, thinking and hoping and not knowing.
Because life was silent.
Because he was silent.
Because society, for once, was blissfully and unfortunately silent. Because things were over, and it was a stretch of victory or a stretch of infection—failure to comply, so it’s a failure to survive.
It was why he took Yuan back to the hospital, went through the six different gates and fences—locked each one behind him, threatened to kill the last crow on the last branch of the last tree in the main yard—Yuan had said bye, black bird—and Wei Ying had wondered where the rest of the bird’s murder had gone off to. But he took his kid back to the designated safe place, deposited him in the struggling tomato garden, and had told him to go right inside or so help him.
“But,” Yuan said, and Wei Ying glared. The kid sighed, gave up. “Okay,” he mumbled, and waved his hands in surrender as he backed up through the dirt and fumbled with the garden’s small plywood gate, then exiting with another shout. “See you later, baba!” Yuan waved. “Be safe!”
And Wei Ying stared after the small form of his kid as he slipped down the path and entered the one door. It was always unlocked because it led to the downstairs lobby—which had enough security as is—which meant Yuan would be able to find Wen Ning once he took a left down a specific hall. He would be okay. They all had been trying so hard to make sure everyone was okay.
God.
He rubbed his forehead, then patted his pocket, then at the holster that was at his other hip.
“Thanks,” He said to the air, and then looked over his shoulder to glare at the crow that was still sitting on that pointy branch of the pointy and big ass tree. “Not you,” he muttered. “You’re weird. Alone as all hell.”
Because the world was ending. Or it already did. And this bird was still around.
Fuck.
—
He went back out to Yiling. Because he had to. And because it was awful out here. And because he still had that urge to hunt and track and gnaw—not the cannibal one but the one that desired power and knowledge. Because it was the apocalypse and Wei Ying wasn’t willing to risk his or his group’s chances of survival. So he had to know who was out there right now, who was new to the city.
—
Nothing was going right. Everything was going wrong. Wei Ying felt like a failure beyond measure. He felt like a failure because everything was blowing up in his face, everyone he loved was gone, and he couldn’t even post a stupid Snapchat story about any of it. He was failing. There was glass in his spine, in his eyes—not in the literal sense, not this time, but his teeth ached and his tears were falling over and over and he felt ill, he was ill.
Everything about this was wrong.
From his shoes to his hair to his life to his lungs to his head. He was wrong, these things were wrong, and life was wrong, and you know what—Ziyuan Yu was wrong for saying Wei Ying was an infectious child with no future. Because he was till fucking here. Wei Ying was still here and he was gagging and he was choking on the smog right now, a dozen burning zombies.
Fuck.
Fucking fuck—
Wei Ying would bet any money that she wasn’t even alive right now. He would bet his own dominant hand that the madame wasn’t even around anymore. He would bet that she died in the first waves, one way or another.
“What about me?” He mumbled to himself, angry. “What about jie? What about Jiang Cheng, madam, what about your husband?”
Because this was all bullshit. Because this was an apocalypse, and Wei Ying wasn’t sure why he was still alive, and he had been counting moments and days and flare signals and dead bodies and strangers and broken ribs and how many bags of grain they still had. And medicine. And everything. Because this was the end, and shit was bad, and Wei Ying was losing his mind more often than not.
“You shouldn’t have left us,” He said, and there was no one to hear him. There was no one to hear a single thing he was saying. “You shouldn’t have left us.”
He wished no one had ever left, really.
Wei Ying almost wished that his foster family hadn’t just vanished out of nowhere. He wished they had taken him with them. He wished that he got to say goodbye to his brother and sister, at the very least. He wished.
“God,” The guy breathed, and his reflection was dirty, and so was the mirror. His eyes watered. He looked like some kind of disoriented Renaissance painting.
Wow. He used to love art. Not this, though, because Wei Ying wasn’t art. Not at all. Wei Ying used to love art class. Not to say it was a great class under any circumstance, because the teacher could be mean and didn’t quite like abstract art—which was what Wei Ying specialized in—but he did enjoy art and its history and its theories. He enjoyed it. But he didn’t enjoy it as much as he enjoyed his music class, which was glittering in all of its possibilities. He played the flute, a dizi, and everyone around him either played something different or something similar, like a clarinet or something.
Then there was Lan Zhan: the guy that Wei Ying drew in splotchy watercolors on more than one occasion.
That guy? A real musical prodigy. He played both piano and the guqin, which Wei Ying was happy to see for a few reasons. One: familiar instrument. Two: it sounded pretty. Three: it sounded lovely with a dizi, if the musicians played correctly. And four: it was also a historically old instrument, and not just new to be new.
Wei Ying, in his normal fashion, talked whenever he was able and played music whenever he was told to. Lan Zhan never explicitly told him to shut up, or to go away, so Wei Ying stayed close—not too close, because even back then when he was on his meds he still was wary about touching people—and talked the guy’s ears off. He had been pretty cool. Back in the first year, at least, because Wei Ying wasn’t sure what he was like anymore. It wasn’t the same world. Lan Zhan had been quiet, sturdy, and well-mannered. He had been a very private person, and his glare had been quite heavy, though that might have just been due to Wei Ying’s finicky and unpredictable behavior.
But now?
Things were more complex. Wei Ying didn’t play a dizi anymore. Hell, he didn’t play anything at all.
He didn’t draw or paint, barely liked repairing the children’s ward within the hospital, but he tried. His mind wasn’t a normal place. He dreamt of lions with dragon-bodies and human hands for feet. He dreamt of fire pouring out of animals’ mouths, of people smoking long sticks that were colored gold, imagining a deep void where a human face was supposed to go.
Everything he did came with strings. He was so tired and he didn’t want to deal with strings. But he did. He had to. It was why the hospital was still up and running, why he tried so hard, as hard as he could.
He had an entire group relying on.
What good would it be to go off and die, right? To spend too much time thinking about the good things? Wei Ying wasn’t sure what the point was. He was exhausted. He was exhausted and hungry and tired and frustrated and scared, and taking care of people on top of trying to take care of himself was a fucking nightmare that never ended with his condition. No therapist to talk to, no medication around to help, and no break from the strain. He couldn’t just hide in the hospital. He wasn’t a little kid. He wasn’t even a teenager anymore.
He hadn’t been a dependent thing since the outbreak, really.
Alone. Quiet.
He wished his phone would charge, but it had long-since been damaged. Its screen was cracked, and as far as he knew the battery was too dead to be fixed. That or, like, it was heavily water-damaged from the time he had to swim through a river with his small belongings in a bag on his back. That bag had not been waterproof. Neither had his phone.
So he couldn’t call anyone.
He couldn’t call his sister, or his brother, or even his foster guardian. He couldn’t text any of his school friends—not that they would like getting a text from him at this hour, because that normally meant he was hyper and not doing too hot—but he wanted to talk to people.
The people he used to know, specifically. School had made socializing so easy. He had been able to talk to everyone and anyone he wanted, as long as they didn’t push him away or tell him to shut up.
It was why he kinda missed Lan Zhan. They hadn’t known each other well. Or, well, maybe Wei Ying hadn’t been paying attention closely. He never was good at the whole pay attention and keep your focus there thing. He always managed to zone out or lose time, which wasn’t ideal in a cliche and fucked up zombie apocalypse, but really wasn’t ideal for the schoolyard drama. Wei Ying missed out on a lot of gossip due to his own issues, and it wasn’t like he ever managed to solve them. Just when he thought he found the right combination of therapy and drugs, the fucking world had to end. Like, damn.
What a way to make living unbearable, God.
(Not that Wei Ying believed in such a being. He wasn’t that susceptible to human-made guilt, paid away by tithing. He would never say this to Granny, though, because she was sweet and didn’t deserve his misdirected anger.)
Here it was: laid out like this, he felt stupid. And desperate. And very out of place for someone who was supposed to know what he was doing. He was supposed to be good at this whole thing. The whole survival thing, right, because he had been scraping by in so many ways before. Like with the Madame, and with his foster siblings, and with that one group home he was in for a small period of time back when he was like, oh, around eight.
Panic.
Something like it.
Because Wei Ying had to take care of people, right, and that never included himself, because he was going batshit insane half the time and gagging on his own spit and choking on the air and seething. He was always mad. Because he couldn’t take the time to grieve or hide or process.
He just had to keep kickstarting. A million times over. And that was heavy, right, never getting a break—not even for a second.
Back before the world had turned bitter and stressful and deadly, right, way back then, he had been okay with pressure and activity. Wei Ying had intentionally gone after it, making sure he was always entertained and stimulated. That had made it easy to live, that had made it easy to handle. To exist as something that wasn’t quiet or stupid or ignorant, because he read his books and worked ahead in school and hallucinated strange things with or without his meds—but with the dumb pills he wasn’t completely nuts, he was just a little less off the walls, just a little.
And people tolerated him when he was like that.
And he didn’t draw so many shapes, so many patterns, so many disoriented people with square faces or blurry faces or black holes for smiles.
Wei Ying was trying. He was really trying. But he missed normal things, would always miss them, probably, and it was like dragging himself through mud. Over and over and over and over and over again. He wasn’t cut out for that kind of thing under any circumstance and that was why he was fucking crazy. He was off the walls insane, right, this must be insanity. This. Right here. Fucking insane! He must be insane!
Staring at his blurry reflection in a hospital bathroom, breathing harshly, unable to look away. Seeing spiders and maggots and blood and gun, old hardware, seeing his brother’s sports bow and seeing the kitchen of his foster family’s house and wondering what the point of any of this was.
Wondering. Really wondering.
How long have I been here? Wei Ying thought. I don’t look like me. He felt sick. He was sick. I don’t even think like me. Then he was angry again, because he was alone, and he didn’t want to be. Is this me?
And the guy in the mirror stared at him. Black eyes, bloodshot, with deep bags. The guy’s shoulders shook and so did his hands and arms. He was a trembling thing, pale, and there was blood down his nostrils and it had caked itself to his lips and dripped down to his chin. It smudged. It was copper. It was proof that he was ill, probably, but he couldn’t really tell—
(Are you okay? Do you need me to tell Mom you can’t go to school?)
—if the guy in the mirror was him or not.
But he could look down.
And by doing so, obviously, he could see his hands. They were his hands. He could tell from the scar and the trembling motion when he squeezed the sink and counter. His nails were bitten low, but one of his hands had crooked fingers from slamming his hand between a metal barricade and a piece of plywood. Ouch. He could recall the incident, more importantly recall the feeling of his bone snapping and splintering abruptly. God, the bruising. God, the fact it had made his accuracy with a gun much weaker and terrible.
He didn’t want to paint.
Or he did, a little, and that was why he was thinking about Vincent Van Gogh and the artist’s descent to madness or whatever.
“Can’t even paint like this,” He said out loud, and the guy’s mouth in the mirror moved up and down. Okay. So that was him. He swallowed. “Man,” the guy breathed out, horrid, “This is such bullshit. I’m supposed to be a straight-A student.”
Couldn’t be a straight-A in the apocalypse, though. He wasn’t able to go to school anymore. Fuck. The freshmen at his high school would never even get the chance to grow up and graduate and enter the workforce or college or trade school or whatever. Damn. Not even the senior class would. Wow. Why was it only just now clicking? He should have known this ages ago. Wei Ying probably did, but probably forgot, or like—maybe he pushed it away. Because it was awful. And he felt awful every time he realized he was never going to learn to live or own a clutch of bunnies or make ends meet in a normal, non-hazardous way.
Wow.
“Fuck,” He said, and he drew out the sound so it echoed for a long time. “Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck.”
Wei Ying hoped he wouldn’t die and become unknown. But then, two seconds later, he hoped no one would ever remember him if he did die. Because it would probably hurt to recall the death of a friend. And this was the apocalypse. And people would die a bunch. He didn’t really want people to suffer the way he was suffering, mental and physical and emotional and—
It was bad.
It was bad because he didn’t want to confide in anyone about anything.
He missed his sister. He missed her hugs as her soft voice and her willingness to stand with him, to take care of him. He missed Jiang Yanli’s kindness. He missed his brother’s roughness, his ragged motion of care—he took after his mother—and all of Jiang Cheng’s attempts at bonding which included walking the dogs or going on runs in the big ass backyard that the house once possessed.
Wei Ying had always been scared of the dogs, but he didn’t yell, didn’t scream, he just walked a few paces behind Jiang Cheng on those walks and laughed when his foster brother ever brought it up. Just nervous, he’d mumble. They scare me. And Jiang Cheng would groan loudly, saying, Princess and Jasmine would never hurt you, idiot, but fine. And they would walk, really walk, and Wei Ying would live a good life and he would go through the motions of everything else in the world, ever.
Sooted. Not sooted. Clean. Sometimes too clean. Sometimes too clean and too much and too white, too spotless.
He missed the world that used to be.
And he missed it really badly. And everything crashed together in a collision of sounds and colors and he was sick with it, most days, but had to cook and clean and kill the dumb undead and help clean out the hospital floors and help Wen Qing garden in that small grass-dirt area that the hospital had fenced up. Wei Ying didn’t know. He was just trying his best. And his best wasn’t good enough, but he was trying, okay? Really trying.
“Fuck you,” The patriarch said to his reflection, and stormed out of the empty bathroom.
—
“It’s important that you take care of yourself,” Wei Ying told Yuan with a frown, and he hoisted the kid up with his gloved and fully covered sleeves and made sure the little thing wouldn’t fall from his grasp.
Yuan sighed whimsically, “I am.”
“Not well enough,” The patriarch corrected, silly, because it wasn’t Yuan’s job to be entirely self-sufficient just yet. He was a bit too young for that. His boy didn’t say anything to that, just carefully put his small hands around Wei Ying’s neck. This was why he wore turtle-neck sweaters. Safety, lack of contamination.
So, like this.
Wei Ying’s group consisted of a child; a doctor; an electrician; a grandmother; a carpenter; and a previous high schooler who had been a prodigy within his Sports Medicine class, but had never finished the course before the apocalypse happened.
(Sorry, Wen Ning. You really deserved your diploma.)
“I am,” Yuan said again, insisted on it like it was law.
Well, law hadn’t been around for a while. There weren’t any cops or government officials around to enforce any rules. Plus, Yiling was entirely deserted. People sometimes passed through here, sure, and Wei Ying didn’t immediately go after them, but it wasn’t like any of them ever stayed for long or survived for long. He had never brought someone back to the hospital before—well, outside of his attempt to bring Mo Xuanyu, back in the day, but that had failed. The only law around here, actually, would be Wei Ying’s word because he was the patriarch and the main leader of the group.
“Well,” Wei Ying hummed, like he was thinking it over in his head. He was mostly thinking about sleeping, and making tomato soup for dinner. “Maybe you are, technically,” he decided, generously. “But you also should sleep when you’re tired.”
“Who said I was tired?” Yuan mumbled, sighing all over again. He resigned himself to his fate and pressed his cheek to Wei Ying’s shoulder.
Well, no one.
Because Yuan only really said he was tired when he was super tired. And right now, the kid had been more interested in the dirt and all of its mounds and struggling tomato plants—no harvest yet—than he was interested in going to bed, even though he could probably use a nap. And a bath, that too. He had grit all over his tiny human face and it was making Wei Ying feel nervous.
“No one,” The man cheered. “But my friend used to tell me that.”
“Oh,” Yuan said.
“Yeah,” Wei Ying laughed, kindly, because it was a delicate memory but not something bad. “He used to say all kinds of things about self-care and affirmation, probably because I wasn’t good at making sure I was alright.” Sure, it made him feel lonely, but he wasn’t sad. He tried not to be sad about life. It wasn’t like he could change who he was or what was happening. It was too late for all that.
His boy hummed, “Did it help?”
“A little,” The patriarch admitted, kindly, and he didn’t mind holding Yuan right now because they weren’t touching skin-to-skin. The dirt crunched under his boots when he started to walk up and down the line of tomato plants. “So now, because he’s not around, I try to take care of myself.” He smiled. “And you, too.”
Yuan giggled into his shoulder. It was okay. This was okay.
—
“Holy shit,” Wei Ying cursed, wild with it. “Lan Zhan?”
And his old high school friend—the guy Wei Ying loved to talk at, not to, because Lan Zhan rarely answered anything he said—was standing right in front of him with zombie blood splattered over his pitch white jacket, his light blue shirt.
This son of a—
“Wei Ying?” He asked, absolutely floored.
(What a fucking day, man.)