#alt. no. 8 | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

i-am-still-bb · 2 years ago

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No. 22

“They never saw us coming, ‘til they hit the floor.” | Glass Shard | Vehicular Accident | "Watch out!"

Alt. No. 8

Hunting

Pairing: Fili/Kili or Fili & Kili Rating: T Words: 2,917

Warnings: Zombies, guns, profanity

A/N: How did this get so long?? Currently listening to a zombie anthology which explains the subject matter.

None of the original prompts sparked anything. So I picked an alternate prompt. And then some of the original prompts sparked inspiration.

Fili hadn’t known that the end of the world would be televised. He had never thought that he would watch the implosion of governments on TikTok on his phone while hiding in his basement listening to the roar of planes overhead.

But it was.

And he had.

Or it was until there was no more cell service. That was when he got scared.

“Hurry up, Fili. We need to get moving.”

Fili nodded, but he did not verbally respond to Thorin’s order. There were no more requests, no more “could you’s.” Everything that needed doing was important and time sensitive. Fili was fiddling with an old GPS that Thorin had in his storage unit.

“You are such a pack rat,” Dis had admonished when Thorin pulled up the metal door that squealed loudly. The storage unit was large, but organized—Bilbo took credit for that—and they were able to quickly sort through and find what they needed.

Winter Gear? ✔ Camping Equipment? ✔ GPS? ✔ Any other old electronics? ✔ Paper maps? ✔ Tools? ✔

The thing was that the GPS unit had not only been stored away because it was obsolete once everyone had smartphones, it had not be entirely functional anymore. And sitting in storage for over a decade had not improved its capabilities and functionality. They were currently traveling using paper maps that were at least 30-40 years out of date and Bilbo’s sense of direction. They were all crammed into a cargo van that Dwalin had used to haul equipment to gigs back when music was a thing that most people had time for. They also had a trailer. Between the two they had stored a lot of things they thought they needed or might need in the future and they had place for the five (hopefully soon to be six) of them to sleep on inflatable camping pads.

It was slow going for many reasons.

The highways were full of stopped cars. Sometimes cars had just been abandoned on the highway. Sometimes only one lane was open and everyone who still had gas to put in a car seemed to be trying to get to the same places.

So they were using narrow, barely two lane county roads most of the time. These were better, but not by much. Cars were still abandoned. Farming equipment could also be blocking these roads along with herds of cattle who had escaped from their enclosures. These roads also had a tendency not to connect all the way through. The road would dead end for a mile only to pick up again. But it was impossible to drive for a mile through the torn up fields. So they had to detour, hope that seemingly straight roads were actually straight, and try to return to their original road.

If it had been winter they could have tried driving across the fields. Frozen earth would support the weight of the van and trailer, but the rough terrain may have done significant damage to their vehicles. But as it was, those were not options that they had to weigh. It was spring. The fields were often muddy swamps that were barely traversable by tractor. Ditches were overflowing. Sometimes roads were impassable due to flooding.

“At least we don’t have to worry about having enough to drink,” Bilbo had offered when Thorin had started cursing the incessant rain.

Thorin had scowled.

But now they had reached an impasse. Thorin’s knowledge could take them no further. The relevant map had gotten soaked by coffee and torn. The roads were now all blurry smears.

So they needed the GPS working.

Now.

Fili felt the pressure not just from those around him, but from within himself as well.

Kili had a habit of not listening and not doing as he was told.

The last communication they had with Kili was over a week ago now. They had been rationing an allotted amount of gasoline in the generator and they had called Kili on the two-way radio that Fili and Kili had left over from their childhood. Kili was told to stay put. To not leave his dorm room unless necessary. The building had a kitchen, bathrooms, exterior doors that locked when closed and you had to have a key to get inside.

But Kili never listened.

That’s how he had broken his arm when he was 6 and his foot when he was 15.

Fili was hoping that for just one time Kili would stay where he belonged. Safe.

What Dwalin was working on kept making clicking metal noises that was driving Fili to distraction. “Can you not?” he snapped, looking up from the GPS unit and his tiny soldering kit.

“No.” Dwalin’s voice was firm with no inflection. And he continued cleaning the guns.

That was the other thing.

There were guns everywhere.

And there were people with those guns.

People who were jumpy, scared, and didn’t know what they were doing. And, more dangerously, were those that were jumpy, scared, and did know what they were doing.

The trailer they were hauling had enough guns and ammunition to power a small militia.

Fili had always hated guns. He had friends who did 4H for the shooting sports and they had wanted him to join. They went deer hunting and drank alcohol pilfered from their parents in thermos. Fili declined. They went to gun ranges and rented guns that you could not legally own and that was their idea of a good time.

Fili would much rather stay at home and build model kits, tinker with electronics, and work on little things that Kili told him he should get patented.

And now guns were everywhere.

But for good reason.

The RN2a virus was that reason.

Scientists were working on a vaccine, but right now there was not much hope. So far the only known infection routes involved direct contact between an infected persons’ bodily fluids and your own mucosal membranes (eyes, nose, mouth, etc.) New information was being released and retracted on a near daily basis. No one was taking their chances.

You could recover from the disease, but having it did not give you immunity. There were people who had it 7 times before it killed them. The disease was not the worst part, nor was the death, it was the “reanimation” that came afterwards.

Those that had been reanimated had already been given a variety of nicknames—Zombies (obviously), biters, the undead—and then there were the more politically correct terms like—infected, afflicted, and reanimated. The news very carefully did not say what they had been reanimated from. They were always careful to talk around the whole “dead come back to life” bit. But everyone knew it. Most people by now had known someone who had succumbed to the disease.

It had started slowly. That was why Kili had still started college like he had been planning before the pandemic started. It grew slowly for over a year, with there being scattered reports of the dead coming back to life (and it being a symbol of the End Times), and then it had exploded in recent months. It hadn’t felt like the end of the world at first. It just felt like a bad flu season, then it felt like COVID all over again with “work from home” and “shelter in place” orders popping up everywhere. Fili returned to his part-time job of delivering groceries just like he had during COVID when he had been finishing up his senior year of high school online.

“We need to move on and find a better place to set up for the night,” Thorin said. “Do you think you can finish this in the van?”

“It moves too much,” Fili replied tersely. “I’ll probably damage it when we hit a pothole or swerve to avoid hitting another fucking deer.”

“It’ll have to wait until tomorrow then.” Dwalin’s voice had a sharp edge and everyone looked at him. Then they all saw the forms moving near the distant tree line.

—

Kili looked out the window of his dorm room into the green space that was sheltered on three sides by the building. A pine tree blocked a lot of the view, but also kept them from being seen.

“Do you think they’re still coming?” Ori asked.

“They wouldn’t just leave us here.” Kili scratched at some dried acrylic paint on the windowsill, remnants of a previous student’s art project.

“I don’t think they’d leave us here,” Ori said defensively. “Just that they got held up. Or something happened.”

“Something did happen. The power went out. And the radios died. That’s all that happened.”

Ori did not say anything more. He looked back at the pages of the book he was reading. The first thing Ori did when it looked like things were getting bad again and like they might all be told to stay in their dorm rooms for weeks on end was go to the library and check out a massive pile of books. Ori caught a clump of pages under his fingernails and ran them up and down. He had been on this one page of a thriller (probably not the best choice) for over thirty minutes now.

“Do you think we should do something?” Kili asked suddenly.

“Like?”

“Like make our way to them? Maybe we’ll run into them on the way.” Kili started pacing the length of the room from the windows, past the desk to the door and back with a detour for the space between their beds.

“And maybe we wouldn’t run into each other. We’d miss each other by a mile and then that would be it unless we both got the radios working again at the same time and were within range of each other.”

Kili grunted. And he kept pacing. And chewing at his fingernails.

“Stop,” Ori said without looking up from the book again, even though he was just staring at the weird shapes that the negative spaces made by the words.

Kili looked up, “Stop what?”

“All of it.”

—

The brick buildings of the college finally appeared. It had taken them over a week to travel what they normally traveled in an afternoon. The town surrounding the college appeared to by empty. There were the same abandoned cars, but there was also random items like trash bins, jackets, single shoes, backpacks, and such littering the road.

Thorin drove slowly. His knuckles white.

Bilbo reached over and put a hand over one of Thorin’s. Nobody said anything.

Fili wanted to jump out of the van right now and charge up to Kili’s dorm, pound on the door, and demand to be let in. He was getting the feeling that nobody was going to be there waiting for them. And the silence in the van told him that he was not the only one with these dark thoughts.

Dis stared out the window and worried her fingers.

“We’ll find him,” Fili said quietly when he took one of her hands in his own.

“I hope so,” Dis whispered.

—

They finally found a place to park that had a decently clear path forward if they had to exit in a hurry, which was always a possibility.

“Do you remember where he was living?” Dwalin asked, stuffing a gun into the waistband of his jeans. This question was directed at Fili. Dis and Bilbo had been charged with staying with the van. They were to keep it running and ready. Thorin had pressed a small but powerful glock into Bilbo’s hands.

“I’m pretty sure it was the one on the other side of the hill.”

“Pretty sure?”

“We didn’t move him this year!” Fili snapped. “I still remember where he lived last year. I know his campus mailing address, but that is no good because it would take us to the main student union!”

“We don’t have time for bickering,” Dwalin interrupted before Thorin could respond. “We need to get moving and get away from the city center.

“Here,” Dwalin held a gun out to Fili.

Fili held up hands, shaking his head, “No. I don’t even know how—”

Dwalin did not drop the hand that held the heavy black metal and plastic object. “You hold it with one hand, steady it with the other, keep both eyes open when you aim, squeeze—don’t pull—the trigger.”

Fili shook his head again.

“Take it or you’re staying with your mother,” Thorin snapped. His eyes were scanning the trees and buildings of the campus looking for any signs of Biters or of students or faculty.

Fili took a deep breath and took the gun. It was heavier than he expected. Following Dwalin and Thorin he was overly aware of the gun’s weight in his hand, it kept pulling his attention when he needed to be focusing on far more important things.

“Are you sure it was them?”

“Ori,” Kili said, stuffing another item into his backpack. “We practically grew up in the van. I would recognize it anywhere.”

Kili slung a duffle bag over his shoulder and then shrugged on his backpack. “Let’s go,” he said, grabbing his keys from the dresser even though it was likely that he would never use that brass colored key to open the door to his dorm ever again. “I saw them turn left towards the sporting fields.”

Ori shut the door behind them with a click.

—

Dwalin flung an arm out, stopping Fili in his tracks. He had been distracted by the unfamiliar weight of the weapon in his hand.

“Biters.”

Thorin’s gun made a small sound when he turned the safety off.

“Where,” Fili wanted to ask. But silence was one of their best protections. He scanned the trees that were just starting to turn green and the red brick buildings hoping to spot them.

“Kili,” he breathed.

“Fuck,” Dwalin swore at the same time.

“What is he doing?”

And then Fili saw the Biters, not fifty yards from Fili and Ori.

Kili grinned when he spotted them and started waving his arms.

Thorin made a harsh arm motion, trying to get Kili to stop.

But it was too late. The Biters had seen them.

“Goddammit,” Dwalin bit out. And he started to run, sprinting across the open green to close the distance between them, Kili and Ori, and the Biters. He squeezed off a few shots while running, but none of them hit their mark. But the noise did draw the Biters' attention away from Kili and Ori who had both frozen in place when they saw the Biters.

There were at least seven Biters.

Dwalin ducked behind the low wall surrounding a decorative fountain. Thorin and Fili followed suit.

“Get over here!” Thorin roared.

Kili and Ori started running. Their bags bounced heavily on their backs. Ori was falling behind until Kili slowed and took a bag from him.

Fili wanted to shout at him, to curse, “Just get over here,” he gritted under his breath. His fingers were cramping where they were wrapped around the now warm metal of the gun. “Come on, Kili.”

Thorin and Dwalin fired off a few more rounds, but this time it did not draw all of the Biters’ focus. Two of them had broken away from the group and were going to cut Kili and Ori off before they reached the fountain.

And then Kili fell.

Fili leapt over the wall before he could even consider the possible consequences.

He could smell the Biters. He could see their red rimmed eyes. Their ragged breathing was loud, whistling.

He was not going to make it to Kili in time.

Fili stopped. Planted his feet shoulders width apart. Ori brushed past him at a run. Raised both of his arms, his left hand cradling the butt of the gun and steadying his right hand. Kili was pushing himself to his feet, eyes fixed on the Biters who were quickly closing the distance. Fili leveled his gaze, both eyes open, the sight was centered on the Biter closest to Kili.

A breathe.

And a squeeze.

Fili did not think about the things he thought he would think if he had to kill a Biter. He always thought he would think about who they had been, who they could be again if the disease could be reversed. His mind was blank. Then he fixed the sight on the second Biter. Another squeeze. And another bloody hole in a human body that stopped moving for the last time.

Fili seized Kili’s hand and together they ran for the shelter of the wall and the protection of the group.

“Are you okay?” Fili asked as soon as they were seated behind the wall, chests heaving with exertion and relief.

Kili nodded. “I think so.”

“What were you thinking? We were coming to get you?”

“I was going crazy looking at the walls of that room.”

“Impatient,” Fili shook his head. “I’m really glad you’re okay.”

“I didn’t know if I’d see you again,” Kili admitted quietly. Fili could barely hear him over the sound of a few more gunshots from Thorin and Dwalin.

“And now you’re going to see me so much that you’re going to get sick of me,” Fili teased. “The van and that trailer are really cramped, and with two more people…”

“I don’t think I’ll ever be sick of you.”

“Good.”

Kili leaned his head on Fili’s shoulder. And for a moment of silence, things felt like they were all right.

Taglist Everything: @silvermoon-scrolls @metztliluaa-blog @i-am-pinkie Fili/Kili: @dubhlachen

#whumptober2023 #no. 22 #lyrics #Watch out!#alt. no. 8 #hunting #the hobbit #fic #zombies #pandemic #bb writes #fili/kili #fiki #or fili & kili if you want to read it that way

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