“No …”

Sleepy lips form the word, and a soft voice moans it. A voice from a man who is done with pain and suffering … and life in general. His hands twitch where they hold on to his arms, bracing for the terror he’s locked inside of – nightmares that won’t leave him, won’t allow him to rest.

Won’t let him forget.

“No ... nrgh … Don’t! … St—stop …”

The pleading starts, a sad whine in the back of Kurt’s throat, but even as Blaine blinks incapacitating sleep from his own exhausted body, as he shifts in his half-comatose state to get his stiff limbs to move, Blaine knows that if he doesn’t act quickly, Kurt will start to scream … and then they will come.

“Shhh.” Blaine keeps his voice low, nearly silent. “It’s alright. It’s just a dream.”

Blaine hears a rustle of leaves and stops, keeping an ear turned to the wind to catch whatever the night has to share with him. Normally, Blaine wouldn’t dare sleep outside at night, but they were tired, too tired to walk even with their lives in danger, and they were lost in the dark. On the road that they traveled through the dense forest, a road they were told would lead them straight to the highway and another farm house nearby, every tree looked the same. The barely worn path was covered with leaves, and Kurt, suffering from shock and enough dehydration to slow him down, refused to take another step.

He didn’t say that he couldn’t. He simply stopped walking.

With the night encroaching, Blaine constructed a makeshift shelter and buried them a foot deep in moss and rotting leaves. There they hid, huddled in the cool cover of the forest, holding their breaths and waiting for the day.

Blaine hears what he thinks might be a shuffle of feet dragging through the brush, and he gently clamps a hand over Kurt’s mouth to silence him. Kurt startles, his eyes popping open, but he does not struggle.

The nightmares are debilitating, but they won’t kill him.

Those who walk the forests at night - soulless, lifeless, dead behind their wide, staring eyes - definitely will.

If they find them.

***

Kurt and Blaine had been on vacation at Kurt’s dad’s house in Lima when the disease (which is what NIMH and the CDC had labeled it) took hold. The outbreak had started with only a few people showing symptoms. Patients zero through three were four members of a German tour group watching a Thanksgiving Day parade at Disney World. The Hummel household watched the events unfold as the two women and two men began to lash out at families standing around them, growling and lunging with their teeth bared, aiming to bite anybody who might be in their way. From what Kurt and Blaine could see (Burt had moved on to another television to watch a game and Carole went to the kitchen to wash the dishes – which she always did when she got nervous) the situation seemed contained. But only a few hours later, the disease spread like wildfire across the inhabited continents. By midnight, thousands of people all over the world had become infected. The Army, the Marines, and the National Guard rushed to quarantine the victims, trying to head-off the devastating virus and stop it from spreading.

Blaine had tried to laugh it off, joking about a zombie apocalypse and the end of days, but his comments did nothing to alleviate Kurt’s anxiety. Kurt kept his eyes glued to the TV, switching channels at the commercials to try and find more information – looking for reassurance that Blaine hadn’t unwittingly hit on it and this was the end of days. They had debated piling everybody into Kurt’s Navigator and making a run for it, but at two in the morning, a police officer with a bullhorn instructed everyone in the neighborhood to stay indoors. Shaking, Kurt peeked through the shades and watched the officer roll down the empty street in his patrol car, repeating the same message over and over: There is no need to panic. Stay calm. Stay indoors. More information will be distributed as soon as it becomes available.

Kurt hadn’t really been a big fan of the cut-and-run plan, but now that that was no longer an option, he felt trapped. Blaine didn’t mind. He was happy to bunker down in the Hummel house with his husband and his in-laws, and wait till this thing blew over.

The neighborhood became quiet, deserted, most of the residents having jumped in their cars and escaped during the night regardless of the officer’s announcement. But Burt refused to leave his house, and Kurt refused to leave his father. Burt had plenty of supplies to last them for several weeks, but as the days rolled on one into another, it didn’t seem like there was much going on outside. Blaine anticipated going to the supermarket any day when Kurt’s favorite coffee ran out or when his father-in-law decided he wanted a bacon fix.

The family spent most of their time on the couch in front of the TV, eager for any news of an end to this epidemic. But all they saw were the huge concentration camps that had been set up to contain the sick. Kurt started staying upstairs in his room most days, unable to stand the sight of the growing number of people with ash grey skin and sunken eyes, moaning wordlessly, mouths agape, stumbling over their own feet – their minds eaten away by the illness. Officials from the CDC continuously assured the public that they were working on a cure, that they were close to a breakthrough, but to Kurt, it looked hopeless. He watched the mass of people with flesh decaying from their skeletons and wondered how in the world could someone recover from that?

One news anchor contracted the illness while reporting from within the walls of the concentration camp, and in an effort to keep people informed (or to win a Pulitzer), he did hourly interviews from a pristinely white and sterile hospital room (behind thick metal doors and bulletproof glass).

Kurt couldn’t watch, but it fascinated Blaine to an almost morbid degree.

“The disease seems to be blood borne,” the reporter re-iterated, as that seemed to be the only information anyone was really sure of. “It’s transmitted mostly from contact with an infected person’s saliva into the blood stream, mainly through bites …” At that point, the reporter showed the camera the bite mark on his wrist. Blaine had been amazed. It looked like barely anything, but teeth had punctured the skin, and that, apparently, was all that mattered. “Gestation of the disease takes between three days and several weeks, depending on the health of the person infected.” The reporter stopped and swallowed hard. Blaine could hear it through the microphone. The reporter’s face (since Blaine could see it up close) looked unnatural and grotesque, his lips black as well as his gums, and at this point he was beginning to have trouble enunciating his words. “You can feel it in your blood,” he said. “You can feel the virus crawling its way to your heart and vital organs. Soon, I’ll be able to feel those being eaten away … or so I’m told.”

The news channels tended to tighten their focus on metropolitan areas – New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Washington D. C., with New York faring the best of the bunch. The streets had been effectively cleared of the infected, and as far as major cities were concerned, it seemed to be the safest place to be. The National Guard had all exits and entrances to the city cordoned off, allowing only residents to enter, so Kurt and Blaine knew they’d be able to return eventually.

What the news channels didn’t show were that smaller areas – rural areas like Lima – had been relatively ignored, since it was felt that their needs weren’t as urgent as larger, more compact, urban areas. Neither were the residents of those areas warned that fully infected populations wandered unchecked in the streets. With no hospitals willing to take in people who showed symptoms, they were told to contact the CDC for care, but were otherwise left to their own devices. So instead, they had mobilized, traveling mostly by night, and attacking random neighborhoods with no distinct pattern.

Blaine, Kurt, Burt, and Carole had absolutely no warning that a mob of the infected had targeted their house in the middle of the night until the windows shattered on the lower level, and a swarm of wayward zombies (because that’s what they were no matter how the CDC tried to paint them) climbed in. Some sliced themselves on fragments of glass, losing limbs in the process; some impaled their whole bodies, paving the way for those behind them to clamber in over their useless corpses. Nothing stopped them. They were a ravenous throng with one objective – an objective that the CDC kept carefully secret.

They were starved. They needed to eat. Like wild animals, they tore into anything that didn’t get out of their way fast enough.

Kurt saw his father and stepmother devoured. They had fallen asleep in front of the living room television after Kurt and Blaine had gone upstairs to bed. Kurt saw the massacre, smelled the blood, and almost screamed out, but Blaine shoved his hand over his husband’s face, squeezing Kurt tight against him and dragging him kicking from the stairwell before the mob noticed them – which they more than likely would soon.

Blaine pulled Kurt out his bedroom window and onto the roof, climbing as high up as they could and hiding in the shadow of the chimney. Kurt shook and whimpered, his eyes shut, tears bleeding down his cheeks, thrashing out in his grief to do something rash. Blaine cradled Kurt against his body while they listened to the horde rage below.

An arm reached out Kurt’s window, searching around for something to hold on to, to follow the scent of fresh blood out onto the roof.

When Kurt heard the hand slapping at the shingles, he stopped moving.

Blaine feared that Kurt might have passed out. There would be no way for Blaine to protect them both if Kurt was unconscious. Blaine would try, of course, with every breath in his body, but he just didn’t think it was possible.

A fight broke out somewhere inside Kurt’s room as other infected people joined the first, mistaking her for the source of the smell. Blaine didn’t see another zombie attempt to make it on the roof, and as the morning sun rose, a scarce few members of the crowd made their way back out of the house and headed for the safety of wherever it was they had come from.

Blaine sat with Kurt in his arms, waiting until he was reasonably certain the house was empty and it would be safe for them to come out of hiding again.

“Kurt,” Blaine whispered, hiding his eyes in his husband’s hair to avoid the glare of the morning sun. “Kurt, we have to get out of here.”

“No,” Kurt whimpered, shaking his head, keeping his eyes sealed tight. “I can’t … I can’t go back into that house. I can’t …”

Kurt begged desperately, his voice becoming childlike as he pleaded with his husband not to make him go back into his father’s house – begged him not to make him see his father’s disgustingly hollow body. Blaine had pinned his hopes on Kurt being strong, on him being the superhero he always was, but he couldn’t expect Kurt to confront such a horrific reality, not after last night – trapped on the roof with no hope of help and nothing but his hands to block the sounds of Burt and Carole’s screams.

These zombies don’t seem to care about killing, just eating. They know nothing of mercy. Even with more than a dozen of them clawing at Burt and Carole, tearing them to pieces, it took longer than imaginable for the couple to die.

Blaine surveyed the neighborhood from the top of the house, gauging their distance from the roof to the ground. It was a pretty daunting drop, but as he swept his eyes over it again, he noticed that the roof of the house sloped down to join up with the roof of the garage, and from there they could make it to the roof of Kurt’s Navigator.

It was excellent in theory, but the execution had been harder than Blaine expected. They had been stuck, cramped on the roof in a tiny corner, kept going mostly on adrenaline, but now they were tired, and the process of unwinding themselves from the human ball they had become was agonizing. Blaine’s entire body ached and shook, but more than that, he wanted to vomit.

But it was Blaine’s turn to be strong, to play the superhero for his husband, so he pushed away the nausea and the pain and helped Kurt down the incline of the roof, keeping an eye out below for any of the infected left over from last night’s raid.

And there were many, but only bodies – some whom had tumbled from the window to the ground in their efforts to make it up on the roof; some impaled on windows, still moaning and pitifully grunting; and some decimated, bodies torn apart in a rage at others not being able to get inside to be part of the feast. Blaine did his best to shield Kurt’s eyes from the carnage while he maneuvered him off the roof, avoiding the bodies of the dead all around – bodies with faces he recognized.

The guy who managed the 7-11 on Elm and 5th.

The young lady who owned that small flower kiosk in the IHOP parking lot – the only one in Lima that sold the purple peonies that Kurt loved so much.

Mrs. Pillsbury, the guidance counselor at McKinley High, and her husband Carl, Kurt’s childhood dentist.

Blaine peeked through the windows of Kurt’s SUV, checking the seats for any possible intruders. When he was confident no one was lying in wait, he put Kurt into the front passenger seat (thanking God that the vehicle wasn’t locked, then retracting that thanks in retrospect of everything that had happened last night).

That left Blaine with one obstacle left to face.

“Kurt” – Blaine ran a hand down Kurt’s bowed back, trying to stop his violent shaking - “I have to go inside and get the keys. And some supplies.”

“No,” Kurt moaned, his head moving ceaselessly from side to side. His whole body shook harder, his knees and forehead knocking into the dashboard. “No! Don’t leave me!”

Blaine felt his husband’s tears grab his heart and dig in, but there was no other way. They had to leave. They couldn’t risk waiting around to see if another mob was coming. With the house a shambles and multiple entry points exposed, he didn’t see them surviving another attack. Even with Burt’s well-stocked garage of spare lumber and hardware, repairing the holes would be a bandage solution. They needed to find a stronghold – a hospital, a government building, a bank, maybe even a prison.

Besides, Blaine had an eerie feeling that they were the only two non-infected people left in Lima.

“I’ll be quick,” Blaine said, pulling himself away from his grief-stricken husband. “I promise. Just keep the doors locked and stay hidden.” As he said these things, Kurt still hadn’t moved, so Blaine locked the doors for him, then double-checked from the outside that the vehicle was sealed up tight.

Blaine started for the front door, ripped from its hinges and hanging askew. He swallowed hard. He couldn’t imagine that anything would have the strength to tear a door off its frame like that, especially not these creatures whose decaying bodies seemed so weak and fragile. Suddenly, Blaine didn’t feel quite so brave or sure that going into the house alone was a good idea. But he forced himself to. He shuffled inside, Kurt’s muffled wails accompanying him into the shattered ruins. 

Blaine stepped a foot through the door, turned his head, and finally lost his battle with nausea. He didn’t want to remember his in-laws the way he saw them, dismembered on the living room carpet, but now that image had been burned into his mind. A piece of the happiness he had gained after marrying Kurt had chipped away, his extended family gone.

Blaine forced himself to move. Through screaming and cursing (he performed only in his head so that Kurt wouldn’t hear), he made his way past the gore and the rank smell of death. He packed up only what they needed – a few changes of clothes and a box of non-perishable goods. He even had piece of mind to grab a few bottles from Kurt’s skin care regimen and their toothbrushes.

He made several trips to the Navigator, barely looking at his distraught husband’s motionless body because if he did, he would lose his hastily built-up strength. He would lose it all to the thought of poor orphaned Kurt - his mother dead because of a drunk driver a lifetime ago, his father torn apart limb from limb. He would sit his ass down in the driver’s seat of Kurt’s SUV, and he would never move again.

Blaine had just finished packing up their final box of provisions when the sinister silence that had veiled the desolate neighborhood broke with the sounds of Kurt’s screams. Blaine gathered up the box and raced for the Navigator, unsure of what in the known universe could make his husband scream so loudly that Blaine not only heard it from inside the house, but through a closed window.

Blaine raced to the open front door and skidded to a stop. He dropped the box on the carpet when he came face to face with it, the icy fingers of fear grabbing him by the ankles and keeping him paralyzed where he stood.

Blaine had had the good fortune of a privileged upbringing. His family was well-off, and for the most part, he’d wanted for very little growing up. Aside from one episode of bullying – getting beaten up after a high school dance - he had never been in any real danger. He was a boxer, a fencer, and had founded the Dalton Academy Fight Club, so he knew he could defend himself.

But he’d never really had to.

So in all his thirty some-odd years on the planet, he had never truly feared for his life.

He did now – staring at the walking corpse that pounded at the Navigator window, trying to get in.

Trying to get at Kurt.

But Blaine’s fear lasted only a moment when he realized it wasn’t only his life in danger. It was Kurt’s. His husband Kurt, whom he had sworn to love and protect.

He looked around him for a weapon, but there was nothing, so he picked up a can from the box and hurled it at the zombie’s head. It hit its mark and lodged into the monster’s skull. The thing whirled around at Blaine, lunging at him with his teeth, biting in the general direction of is arm, stymied by the object that had taken out one eye and most of another. Even missing an eye, the creature seemed to sniff him out, following him by the scent of his aftershave … or perhaps his blood, since that seemed to be what drove these creatures, what forced them out of the darkness to attack living people around them. This thing (since Blaine had a hard time of thinking of them as people anymore) took a swipe of him, managing to grab hold of his wrist, but Blaine tugged hard and yanked his arm away, taking the creatures decaying hand off with him. All the while, Kurt’s screams filled the air – high-pitched and frightened, senseless with mind-numbing fear.

Blaine climbed into the vehicle, holding his arm out the window and smacking his wrist against the door to dislodge the hand while they drove away from Kurt’s home, most likely never to return. Blaine had taken a moment to look in the rearview mirror and watch the brainless zombie smack its one hand at its face, trying to get rid of the can, wandering in circles in the front yard. Blaine wanted to feel pity for it – it used to be human – but he couldn’t. Not with Burt and Carole dead. Not with Kurt a hysterical mess, mumbling nonsense and trembling in his seat, his sanity all but gone.

They had driven in Kurt’s Navigator until there were no passable roads anymore, the highways jammed pack with abandoned vehicles, as if their drivers and passengers had simply evaporated into thin air. They opted to stay the night in the Navigator, assuming that help would eventually come.

It had to.

But it never did.

Instead, as night began to fall, they came – walking en masse onto the roadway, emerging from the tree line. Kurt and Blaine climbed to the back of the vehicle, huddling together beneath an emergency blanket to hide, hoping that they would avoid detection. But the mob had seen the movement of the car. All night long Kurt cried while the creatures pounded on the windows, rocking it back and forth but not tearing it to pieces the way Blaine had expected considering the condition of the house they had just left. These infected people seemed further along, their bodies stiffer and more riddled with decay.

If there actually was a cure anywhere that could eradicate this disease, these poor souls were far beyond its ability to heal.

Kurt and Blaine traveled for days on foot, spending the nights awake, moving, always moving, in fear of being attacked. They managed to bed down a few times with kind people who were hiding out like themselves, but they never stayed in one place for long. Kurt’s nightmares were unceasing, and the generous people who harbored them became frightened of the screams he made while he slept – screams that lured the creatures from hiding in search of a meal. In between houses, they had to make due sleeping in the underbrush or high up in the trees. Once, to navigate a field full of these undead, they had to resort to covering themselves in rancid human blood in order to hide among them.

Blaine thinks that might be the point where Kurt snapped, because he has become like a zombie himself now – a different kind of zombie – one who never speaks or sings anymore, one who fights to hide every emotion, one who has mostly given up.

Blaine has tried, but he can’t find a way of getting the old Kurt back.

But now, they’re running out of time.

Blaine can feel it in his blood.

He stays awake, holding Kurt in his arms until his trembling husband falls back to sleep, and concentrates on the searing death in his veins, trying to will a stop to its progress.

Blaine made a promise the day he married Kurt to always protect him, to always care for him, and he is cashing in on that promise right now. He has one goal in mind – to get Kurt back to their apartment and lock him safely inside, before the bite on his wrist – the one he had gotten when he fought with that creature, the one he hasn’t told Kurt about – takes hold …