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justaphantomhuman · 8 months ago

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THE FIC!!!! THE COMPANION PIECE TO THIS EI ART

THANK YOU SCARLETSAPHIRE FOR BEING MY TALENTED WRITER <3333

Danny's parents are wrong. There is no such thing as ghosts, and the "portal" in their basement is nothing more than a hole in the wall. A hole in the wall that holds a nefarious illness that causes Danny to start rotting from the inside out. When other citizens of Amity Park begin to exhibit the same horrible symptoms, will they be able to stop it, or will the city fall to this mysterious virus? -- A little late, but here's my second entry for @ecto-implosion 2024! This one is with @justaphantomhuman whose art you can find here: https://www.tumblr.com/justaphantomhuman/768612892548513792/ectoimplosion-2024?source=share I hope you all enjoy!

The first other person who got infected, or at least that Danny noticed got infected, was the lunch lady. She'd been working at Casper High for as long as anyone could remember, with a picture of her next to the brand new lunch menu hanging in the back of the cafeteria, dated 1967 to prove it.

She’d always been nice. Not overly so, not in an overbearingly, tooth rottingly sweet kind of way, but in the “always adds a little extra on mashed potato day” kind of way. The exact level of nice a lunch lady should be.

Maybe Danny should’ve noticed something, when she started adding way more than a little extra mashed potatoes, both to his tray and everybody else’s. Maybe he should’ve noticed when she no longer seemed to reply to the students, working on autopilot and regurgitating a script of “Eat, eat, growing boys and girls need to eat!” He definitely noticed when the force of scooping pees cut into her wrist, and the now loose flab of skin fell into the less than stellar minestrone.

The horror sinking into his gut was almost enough to cover the piercing hunger.

He grabbed Sam and Tucker’s arms, dragging them away from the lunch line to the closest table they could talk freely at.

“Whu- hey!” Tucker protested, but he didn’t try and break Danny’s grip. “What’s your deal?”

“Did you see that?” He hissed through clench teeth. He ignored their loose rattle.

“See you sacrificing my spot in line? You bet I did.”

Sam elbowed Tucker in the side, which did nothing to stop his protests. She was just better at drowning them out. “Saw what?”

“Her- her wrist. It just fell off. Into the soup.”

Sam paled, and Tucker cut himself off.

“Like…” Tucker asked, eyes darting to Danny’s neck where his skin was still red and loose.

Danny nodded. “Exactly like that.”

Sam leaned forward, lowering her voice to a whisper. “We can’t let people eat that.”

“Agreed.” Danny's eyes darted to the lunch line; students trailed back to the cafeteria doors and out into the hall. “But how?”

“Easy. Sam, scream that you saw a rat.”

Sam turned sharply to Tucker. “Why do I have to do it?”

“Because you’re a girl, and you can scream louder!”

“We both know that's not true! And besides, I would not scream at a rat.”

“Hey! I have a very manly scream!”

Danny would’ve bit his lip, if he hadn’t spent the last month training that reflex out of him. They didn’t have time for their bickering. They had to act fast.

He jumped up on the table, pointing towards the food line, and screamed as loud as he could. “Is that a rat?!”

To Tucker’s credit, the plan worked wonderfully. The students in line immediately dissolved into chaos, screaming and dropping their trays and running from the line. In some cases, they ran from the cafeteria altogether.

Danny did not pay attention to the commotion. His eyes remained drained on the lunch lady, as she continued to spoon more and more soup into an abandoned, overflowing tray. Her grip on the spoon didn't waver, even as she began to wear through the bone, more and more splatters of blood mixing in with the soup below.

—

Maybe it was a good thing that the first zombie was revealed in such a public way. When Principal Ishiyama came to try and figure out what was happening, she immediately called the police. And of course, Danny’s parents, with their radio tuned in on police channels at all times, arrived first.

He wished he could've watched them work, but he couldn't; they’d evacuated the cafeteria the moment they arrived.

“This is why you should bring your hazmat suit to school, sweetie!” Maddie had said, her voice muffled through the full face mask that she wore. Then she was gone through the double doors of the cafeteria to clean up the mess the lunch lady had made, both of the lunch line and of herself. By the time they were done, Danny had left the school grounds.

“Any ideas on how this could happen?” he asked, consciously fighting the effort to kick a rock down the sidewalk. He’d already splintered his toe nail in two once; he didn’t need to do it again.

Sam worried at her bottom lip before shaking her head. “Not that I can think of. Unless you decided that you were sick and tired of beef paste for lunch?”

Danny threw his weight into her side, knocking her off the sidewalk for just a second. She laughed, then adjusted her course.

“Maybe we’re looking at it wrong.” Tucker did not look up from his PDA as he spoke, fingers flying over the buttons. “Maybe it isn’t like the movies.”

“Well, we don’t exactly have a lot else to go off of.”

“Yeah, my parents expected to find ghosts, not freaky zombie virus.”

Tucker snapped his fingers and pointed at Danny. “But we have that!”

Sam and Danny shared a look. “What, ghosts?”

“Cause we definitely can’t handle ghosts and zombies at the same time.”

“No, of course not.” Tucker held up his PDA, letting Danny see some kind of study displayed on screen. “Viruses!”

Danny took a moment to digest the words before the substance became clear to him - it was on how viruses spread.

“Its a place to start at least,” Sam said with a shrug

“I do think that's still like the movies,” Danny teased. “It’s not like zombie viruses are real.” He corrected himself after a moment. “Were real.”

“I mean they kind of are though, present company excluded. There’s some kind of brain disease that takes over deer. And mind controlling funguses that kill ants.”

“Why do you know that?” Danny asked.

“It’s Sam, of course she knows about zombie diseases.”

“Fair point.”

“Anyway, viruses are normally transmitted through either touch and bodily fluid and stuff, or through the air. We’ve already established you weren’t swapping spit with the lunch lady through any means-” Tucker ignored Danny’s pronounced gagging noise. “-so she must have gotten sick through the air.”

“That’s great!” Sam’s voice was full with as much fake cheer as she could ever muster. It all dropped with her next sentence. “Except that doesn’t make any sense.”

“It makes perfect sense! What else could have infected her?”

“Ok then, riddle me this. If it's transmitted by air, why haven’t either of us started peeling yet?”

“Well, obviously-” Tucker snapped before stopping both his sentence and his walk, leaving Danny to run straight into his back.

Danny backed up quickly, hand flying to his nose. It came up covered with congealed blackish blood. “Aw, crap.”

“I am so sorry dude, I didn’t think-”

“It’s fine,” Danny waved him off with his clean hand. “Just- tissues?”

Tucker nodded and handed him the small pack from his bag.

“It doesn’t look too bad at least,” Sam said, craning her neck to try and see the damage through the gore. “A little smushed more smushed, but not any more noticeable than the last three times.”

“That’s good.” Danny tore off two bits of the tissue and plugged them into his nose, then began wiping off the rest of it with the remainder. “Sam does have a point though. Anything that could infect her should’ve infected you guys by now.”

Tucker bit his lower lip. “Yeah, you’re right.”

“Maybe it's just random?”

“Maybe it is,” Danny said, looking at the soaked through tissue in his hand. He ignored the way his skin hung loose in some places, and the thin red marks that covered it. “Let’s hope that it randomly decides to fuck off soon.”

—

The lunch lady was in Danny’s basement now, with a pot of water colored brown and a lunch tray that drained back into the pot. It was almost impressive how quickly Danny’s parents figured out how to keep her contained. As long as she had lunches to serve, she was perfectly happy to sit there forever. Which meant that Danny would have a zombie in his basement for who knows how long.

It’s not like he could judge much. There was a zombie in every room he was in anymore.

He removed the hazmat suit his mother had insisted he wear after he got upstairs. His dad was right where he’d been when Danny got home, crouched on the floor surrounded by tweezers, a magnifying glass, and a minefield of vials. “What are you doing?”

Jack threw Danny a beaming smile that was just barely visible through the hazmat hood screen. “Picking up all of the samples she left in the floorboards. Don’t want to let anything go to waste!”

“Oh. Well, good luck.”

“Thanks kiddo! Oh, and your mother wanted me to tell you that there’s twenty dollars on the fridge. You and Jazzy pants are gonna need to get yourselves dinner.” He turned back to the floor picking off more tiny scraps with the tweezers. “Your mother and I are gonna have our work cut out for us. You know how it is, science waits for no man!”

“Thanks, but I’m not very hungry.” Danny’s stomach growled, betraying his lie.

Jack laughed. “You’re probably just turned off from everything at lunch. Why don’t you go place the order. Number for pizza’s on the counter!”

Danny nodded his head, then made his way to the phone in the kitchen. He was hungry. He was always hungry lately, and he knew damn well pizza wasn’t going to do anything to help. Still, Jazz would be getting home soon, and it would be nice for her to have something to eat.

He ordered the veggie lovers pizza with extra mushrooms, just like Jazz always wanted but he’d always fought against. Danny had always held the opinion that if you were going to put that many green things on a pizza you’d be better off with a salad, but he wasn’t going to be eating it anyway.

Danny had made himself comfortable on the couch while he waited for the pizza. His dad had finished prying skin cells from the floor and had returned to the basement, probably to begin analyzing the samples. Danny had been absentmindedly flipping through tv channels when the bell rang.

On the other side of the door was a short fat man holding far too many pizza boxes for one order. “Box collector!”

Danny blinked slowly. “Um… I think you have the wrong house.” He slowly began to push the door closed. “No!” the man bellowed, sticking his foot into the gap of the door. “You called to steal my boxes, I heard you, I heard you say it!”

“Listen dude, I don’t know whats wrong with you, but I’m not trying to take anything from you!” Danny pushed harder, but the man didn’t budge.

“Attempted thief! I have come to ensure that you have not taken any other boxes from the box collector!” He was getting louder and louder with each word, trying to push his way into the house.

“I said leave!” Danny grunted, pushing on the door as hard as he could. There was the sickening sound of bones cracking, and for a brief moment Danny stared at his hands still pressed against the door trying to figure out which of them had snapped. But his hands were fine, his fingers were fine, and neither of his arms weren’t bent weird or limp.

His eyes trailed down to the foot still in the door, blood spewing from the gouge the force had left. The bones were crushed together, some poking through the skin, revealing their splintered ends.

The man on the other side of the door did not stop trying to force his way inside. He didn’t even pause in the box themed ramblings, stacks of pizza boxes still visible through the crack in the door.

“Mom! Dad!” Danny yelled towards the basement door. “We have an emergency!” There was a beat, then two where he didn’t hear anything, and he could almost feel his heart drop into his stomach. Then the pounding of footsteps on metal seemed to shake the house, and his parents threw open the basement door open with a crash.

“Danny! What’s going on?” Maddie said, Anti-Creep Stick gripped tight in her hands.

“There’s-” The door was shoved hard against Danny, and he stumbled before regaining his footing. “Another one!”

“Another-” her eyes went to the bloody mess on the door frame before she nodded her head. “Jack-”

Jack didn’t need to wait for whatever Maddie was going to say, already running to the door to take the burden off of Danny. “I got it! Go help your mother.”

He ran to his mothers side. “I need you to think really hard. What was he doing here? Was there something he was focused on, something he won’t stop doing besides getting into the house? Anything you can think of.”

Danny nodded. “That’s easy. He’s been talking about boxes this whole time, and has like. A dozen pizza boxes. He’s been accusing me of trying to steal them from him.”

Maddie looked away from Danny, surveying the room. “Go to the storage closet upstairs and get as many boxes as you can. Dump whatever's in them on the floor, we can clean it up later. Bring them to the basement.”

Danny didn’t ask what the plan was, just taking off to do as she said. The storage closet had plenty of boxes of all sizes in it, all filled with dusty old junk that was soon sitting in sagging piles on the floor. He threw the boxes over the banister before following them down the stairs.

Getting them all into the basement was a tricky endeavor, but he managed, and soon Danny was standing in the basement surrounded by empty cardboard boxes and a slowly decaying lunch lady. His mother was nowhere to be seen.

“Mom?” he called out.

“No mother here, just some delicious soup! Come on sweetie, have a bite!” the lunch lady said. Danny ignored her.

“Over here!” Maddie’s voice was muffled and came from underneath one of the workbenches. Danny made his way over, trying to push the boxes along with him. “Did you get the boxes?”

“As many as I could. What are you gonna do with them?”

“I’m going to trap him.”

“...with boxes and a desk?”

“There’s a hole in the wall that leads to some kind of crawlspace,” Maddie said. “Pass me that?” She gestured to a sheet of metal, and Danny obliged. “If he does have this obsession with boxes, he should go straight in. And when he does-” Maddie let the sheet of metal fall, blocking the gap underneath the workbench.

“Is that going to hold him?”

“We’ll weld it on if we have to, but if our hypothesis is correct, then he shouldn’t even try to get out.” She lifted the metal plate back up and left it on the workbench. “Start tossing boxes into the space back there. I’ll try and lure him in.” She turned to the stairs to leave.

“Wait, no, you’re not going to act as bait!”

“We don’t have much of a choice!” she snapped.

“Let me do it instead.” Maddie stopped dead in her tracks, so Danny continued. “If its some kind of illness then I’ve already been exposed at the door, right? You’re better with welding too, and for all we know, he’s only mad at me.”

Danny could almost hear her inhale through the hazmat suit. “Fine. But be safe, and don’t get hurt.”

“I’ll try.” That’s all Danny could do.

—

Danny remembered Dorathea as a happy girl, bubbly and excited and always wearing old fashioned clothing. Something about her family being renaissance faire actors who had more costumes then clothing. She never seemed to mind, even when Paulina picked on her for it. Dora always said it made her feel pretty, and she’d spin in her full length dress and knock the pencil right off Paulina’s desk. No one ever knew if it was on purpose or not, but it got the bullies off of Dora’s case.

The Dora Danny remembered was very, very different from the one in the hospital bed.

He knew she’d gotten sick. Really, really sick, the kind of sick that meant she hadn’t ever set foot in Casper High, hadn’t even set foot out of the hospital in months, but knowing that was very different than seeing it. She was pale, her lips almost blue, her cheeks sunken and wires and tubes glued to her scalp and stuck in her skin, leading to IVs and breathing machines and monitors that Danny couldn't even guess at their purpose.

What made it all worse was the work down skin from where she was cuffed to the bed. She was still straining against them, pushing her IV needle further into her skin, causing it to bulge and twitch with every movement. She was trying to say something, but the oxygen mask over her mouth made the words completely unintelligible.

“It's lucky she was here,” Maddie said to Dora’s older brother, who was scowling at the Fenton’s from the other side of the hospital bed. “The data from her onset may help us save the entire town.”

“I don’t care about the town,” Aragon sneered. “I want you to fix her.”

“Well, given what we’ve seen of previous specimen, it’s likely that-”

“We’ll try our best.” Jack interrupted her with a hand on her shoulder. “Won’t we, Mads?”

The two of them locked eyes, before Maddie nodded. “We’ll do everything we can.”

It took a good hour for the Drs. Fenton to review Dora’s scans and records, and another twenty minutes for them to set the hospital room up the way they wanted. The whole time Danny sat in one of the uncomfortable visitor chairs, bored and confused. His parents had packed him into the car once they’d gotten the call without telling him what was going on, and the explanation they’d given him on the ride was lackluster, to say the least. Only that they’d need his help.

That left Danny to spend nearly an hour and a half sitting there watching Dora. It was clear that she was infected and not just in the way the heels of her feet were worn through from dragging them against the bedsheets. He could see it in her eyes.

She wasn’t blinking, keeping her eyes wide and frantic and shining with a fevered, desperate need for… something. Danny didn’t know what. If he could understand her frantic mumbling through the mask she’d probably tell him, but that probably wasn’t going to happen anytime soon.

“You ready Danny boy?”

Danny tore his eyes away from Dora’s towards his father, smiling at him expectantly. “I would be if you’d tell me what we’re doing.”

“We’re studying the onset, of course! One of our good friends here at the hospital noticed her deterioration and thought it looked like something your mother and I are interested in, so they called us for a consultation!” Jack rubbed his chin. “Well, she said it looked like that weird mumbo jumbo we called science back in college, but close enough!”

“Yeah, I got that. Why am I here?”

“To help, of course!”

“I think what your father is trying to say-” Maddie cut in, “-is that we want you to help run some tests on Dora here, so we can measure her reactions, psychologically and physiologically.”

“Exactly that!” Jack nodded enthusiastically. “Seeing as you already know her, and your…” he trailed off, glancing down at the compression socks Danny wore around his lower legs. His parents had bought them for him, after they’d figured out, well, everything. “...unique condition, we thought you’d be the perfect fit!”

“Oh. Yeah, I can do that.” Danny stood up from the chair, trying to shake the chill that settled into his bones.

“Wonderful! We’re going to sit over here and monitor everything. When we give you the signal, go ahead and remove the mask. Then just… talk! If we need something else, we’ll ask, okay?” His mom ruffled his hair before moving to the fair side of the room. She used to kiss his forehead, back before they realized he was a contagion risk, but she didn’t now. He missed it.

“Whenever you’re ready, Danno!”

It was almost surprising that Dora didn’t snap at Danny’s fingers when he removed the mask, especially with how she kept staring at him. The same fevered look in her eyes, desperate and needy and begging him for something, it made Danny almost feel like prey. It made the first words out of Dora’s mouth even more surprising.

“Will you go to homecoming with me?”

Danny blinked out of surprise more than necessity. “Um. What?”

“Homecoming!” Dora smiled wide, so wide that the corners of her lips seemed to stretch and crack. “It's soon, isn’t it? I’ve had the principal sending me every flyer and poster for weeks! So, will you go with me?”

Danny glanced back at his parents, but they didn’t seem to notice. His mother was engrossed in the display for the machines Dora was hooked up to, and his dad was scribbling notes onto a clipboard with such speed Danny was afraid he was going to break the pen.

Danny began to answer. “Uh… sorry, but I wasn’t really planning on…” He cut himself short as he saw Dora’s eyes narrow, her hands clenched into fists so tight he could see blood trickling from her palms. He quickly changed course. “But if its with you, I’d love to go!”

Her reaction to his yes was maybe even more disturbing, as she fought against her restraints in what Danny thought was celebration. The noises she were making were certainly celebratory, though definitely not intelligible. Finally, after what felt like an eternity, she spoke again. “Wonderful! We’re going to dance, and drink punch, and spend the whole night together! I need to practice so I don’t step on your feet!” She giggled, and began turning her body side to side. She didn’t even seem to notice the restraints as she kept twisting to her left, further and further before the sickening snap of what Danny could only imagine was a part of her spine breaking echoed around the room.

Dora’s smile never fell of her face, and her soft humming never fell from her lips.

Danny glanced to his parents yet again as he backed away from Dora, this time met with their looks of horror. Not at Dora and the scene in front of them, but the display. They weren’t writing anything down anymore. Instead, they shared a look, this one holding so much more weight than the one they’d shared when Aragon.

“We’re done here, Danny.” Maddie stood from her chair and started her way out of the room. “Your father will take you home. I need to make a call.”

–

Amity Park had emergency broadcast speakers. That was new information to everyone, including the speakers, if the surprised crackling noises that emanated from it were anything to go off of. When it finally managed to clear into an audible voice, it was a woman’s, cold and calculated.

“This is an emergency broadcast from the United States Government. If you are hearing this, you are currently under quarantine. Any attempts to leave the bounds of Amity Park will be met with martial force. If you have any questions regarding the authenticity of this announcement, please contact your local government officials. If you have any questions regarding the conditions of your containment, please report to the city hall for a briefing performed by Dr. Madeline and Jack Fenton. Thank you.”

Danny assumed that the announcement was met with chaos. He could picture people yelling into the phone at the mayor’s secretary, people driving to the town outskirts to find the agents, dressed in full, pure white hazmat suits blocking off the road. He imagined people looking at themselves in the mirror, scouring themselves for signs of an illness they hadn’t realized they’d contracted. And then Danny pushed that from his mind, because his parents were wrong.

“We know why you’re all here.” His mother’s voice, amplified by the microphone on the podium, echoed through the walls. “And we want you all to know that we know how you think of us. How you think of our work and our research.”

Danny should’ve been out there with them. Jazz was, and she’d only been informed of the whole situation while Maddie ran through government phone numbers. She hadn’t taken the news well. She’d called their dad a liar, a kook, a fake scientist who was living in delusions.

Jack had shown her Dora’s scans. The lunch lady, still in the basement with her lower legs swollen to the point of bursting because her heart had given up pumping, who still greeted the family with a smile and scooped them an ever draining bowl of soup. She’d stopped protesting, when the facts were in front of her.

That was why Danny hadn’t given up yet. He had more facts. He knew that they were wrong, that they were making a mistake. He was proof of that. They just didn’t believe him.

“We want to assure you that we are not overreacting. We are not working on fake numbers, and we are not wasting your time. We would be happy to explain our data to anyone interested, just like we explained it all to the CDC, and then the agents of the GIW who recorded the announcement that brought you all here today.”

They were making a mistake, getting everyone so panicked. It was all going to be just fine, like Danny was. Different, sure. It was going to be very different, but Danny had adjusted to the different just fine. The rest of the town would too.

“We won’t try to put it lightly. We are all dead.”

It would take some time, and people would probably end up hurt. It would suck really, really bad. But it wasn’t death . It wasn’t the end of Amity Park, or the end of the world like they’d been discussing with the agents. It was just… a change.

“A few months ago, an airborne illness was released into the city, infecting everyone who lived here. It progresses slowly, eating away at the infected person's brain until they can no longer feel pain, until their body can no longer sustain themselves. They become solely interested in one thing, one activity or purpose that they dedicate themselves to while the virus continues to eat away at their bodies and the chemicals their damaged brain can still produce.”

Danny wasn’t a mindless shambling creature, he was still him . They’d done scans and tests to try and figure out how it happened, how Danny became an exception. They couldn’t figure it out. Not for certain, but they had a hypothesis.

“You may have heard of some incidents these past few weeks, of common Amity Park citizens suddenly going crazy. We believe the reason they were so susceptible to this disease is because of preexisting brain damage. The disease had less to do, and was therefore able to progress to its final stages quicker then in a healthy specimen. We don’t know how long the majority of us have yet. It could be weeks, or months, or hours. It is just a matter of time.”

The electrical shock from the initial incident had stimulated the virus in Danny’s body into its final stage too early. It didn’t have the time to cause the type of damage it needed to revert Danny to the mindless actions the other infected displayed. It would be impossible to replicate, they said. Danny didn’t believe them. They were wrong, their hypothesis was stupid, and they should never have tried to lock things down. People were going to panic over nothing.

“We won’t hold you here any longer. Our advice to you all is to get your affairs in order. Call your loved ones who live out of town, hug your family, and find something you love to do. You’ll have the rest of your afterlife left to do it. If you have any questions, we will be in the town hall for the remainder of the day.”

This wasn’t the end of Amity Park. Danny knew it. They would all live to see tomorrow, and every day after it. He wouldn’t accept anything else. He couldn’t.

–

The sun was big and beautiful, painting the sky in brilliant shades of orange and red and yellow. Its blinding light was blocked by the leaves of the tree hanging over Danny headed, shielding his eyes from the worst of it. The day had been warm, inching just slightly towards uncomfortably so, but now that the sun was setting it was perfect. He took a deep breath that he did not need, letting the fresh air move through his lungs and into his body.

“It’s funny, looking back on it.” Sam sat on his left, and Tucker on his right. It had become sort of a routine of theirs, to sit and watch the sunset together. There wasn’t much else to do in town anymore, since the power grid got shut down. “Everyone was so worried that it would be the end of the world, but we’re still here.”

Neither of his friends replied, but that wasn’t unusual. They didn’t talk much anymore. He didn’t really blame them. Jazz had talked about how trauma can cause selective mutism, and this whole thing had been traumatic, even if it had all turned out just fine.

“I’m glad I was right.” The grass was cool under his fingers, the ones on his left slick with moisture. It might’ve been warm, if things were different, but it wasn’t. He didn’t mind that. Cool meant water. Dew drops. Fresh rain. Warm was… not those. “I don’t know what I would’ve done if I wasn’t.”

A soft buzzing sound came from his right. Danny didn’t turn to look; he didn’t need to. He knew what it was already. Bees. Only bees, buzzing by his ear, Nothing else. “I don’t need to. Everythings ok, and I still have you guys.”

It was instinct that his hand moved, following the cool liquid to its source, tracing the blades of grass and twisting roots to where they pushed into Sam’s wrist. The tips of his fingers were slick with her blood, but he didn’t think about it, and she didn’t care. Couldn’t care.

He closed his eyes as he turned and smiled at Tucker. He didn’t want to see the bulge of a radio speaker in Tucker’s mouth, bloody tears stretching along his cheeks. He didn’t want to see the dial he’d shoved into his eye, tuned to a station that no longer exists, spitting out nothing but the soft buzzing static.

“And we’ll always have each other.”

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