Archive of Our Own

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Eduardo might already be dead. He might have died right after the phone cut off. Schrodinger's Eduardo, both dead and alive in the far away glow of Floridian sunlight.
- the time is come when the day is done, by moogle62

PART ONE: Singapore

Where were you when you heard?

Where were you when you first truly realized that, from this moment on, everything was going to be different?

Where were you the first moment it dawned on you that this weirdo strain of super-flu that began with a sneeze in the back of a New York City taxi cab was going to accomplish what global warming, gays serving in the military, and the concentrated efforts of the GOP had thusfar failed to do?

Where were you when you stood on the edge of one moment, and the next, and saw civilization collapse?

-

The memories of recent important historical events are permanently scored onto Eduardo's consciousness, same as they are for practically everybody in his generation.

He can tell you where he was when the news of the Columbine shooting cut through the afternoon television broadcast. He can tell you what he was doing when the first plane hit the Twin Towers, his senior year of high school. And likewise, he can tell you exactly what was going on when, on the other side of the globe, the first corpse sat bolt upright on an autopsy table, and the world spun on its axis, swinging that much closer to ending.

-

It's a Monday, and it's Lin Yao's birthday, too early in the morning for the puddles from the overnight rain to have evaporated yet, and Eduardo's soles squelch wetly on the linoleum when he enters the company building. He takes the stairs, briefcase hooked on two fingers and the others folded precariously around a paper bag, his phone to his ear.

He pins it there with his shoulder so he has a hand free to pull open the door for his landing, sliding the hand behind him so it doesn't slam.

"We'll see you soon, right, Eduardo?" His cousin's wheedling is close and warm in his ear; she's been trying to get him to fly out since high holidays, at least. She's been progressively less subtle with each attempt to goad a promise out of him at the end of every call, because it's never easier to get someone to heedlessly agree with you about something than when they're trying to hang up on you.

Don't tell her, but Eduardo's already bought a ticket, plane and rental car booked in a package deal through Expedia (DOT COM, oh come on, like you can resist shouting it, either). He still needs to figure out what he's bringing them as a gift, though; what can he get her son here in Singapore that he can't get in Miami? Something a six-year-old would like?

Making a mental note to make himself an actual note about it, he tells his cousin, "yeah, watch out!" in return, same as he has at the end of practically every conversation he's had with her since he was twenty years old, and hears her chuckle before she pulls the phone away from her ear.

Thumbing the end call button, he looks around, and spares Magnolia a frown.

"Where is everybody?" he asks, shifting his grip so that he's not holding food and briefcase solely in one hand; his knuckles have cramped up.

He glances around the cluster of cubicles, the line of office doors at the far end of the floor standing dark and empty, even his own. It's not National Day -- Eduardo's made that mistake before; came in and sat down and was in his office for a full thirty minutes before he figured out it was a public holiday, and he's still trying to live it down, thank you very much.

Mag shrugs. Her shirt today is the color of seashells, creamy and off-white. "I heard that American flu is making its way down the mainland to us. People are probably staying home as a precaution."

Eduardo frowns -- now that she mentions it, he did see an abnormally high number of people wearing sick-masks on the subway. He hadn't thought anything of it, just attributed it to seasonal sniffles. It's June, sure, but it's hard to predict when these things will make an outbreak.

"Huh," he goes, his brain ticking over and putting the pieces together. "That's right. I remember reading somewhere that China reported a couple cases, but I hadn't realized it's spread that far on this side of the world." He quirks his mouth. "Weird time of year for the flu, yeah?"

Mag shrugs again.

Eduardo shrugs back, and hands her the bag. "These were for Yao, they're his favorite," he says. "Since it's his birthday, but if he's not coming in, then I guess they're ours," and after that, he goes into his office and he sits down to start cleaning off the weekend's backlog.

This is what he'll remember, keen and achingly clear even months and years later -- when he backtracks through his memory, sorting events, this is the day he marks as the last day of his normal life, and he spends it doing completely average things. Lin Yao comes in a little after lunch, sniffing the air in a hopeful way, and, guiltily, neither Mag nor Eduardo mention what happened to his present. Eduardo folds his arms over the partition between the cubicles and watches the man shed his raincoat carefully, pulling his sick-mask down around his neck. It leaves a line of red around his mouth and across the bridge of his nose.

"The States are losing their collective shit," he says contentedly by way of greeting; Lin Yao's never so happy as he is in the face of doom and gloom.

"Oh? About that flu thing?" Eduardo asks.

"Yes. Whatever it is, it's hit them really hard."

He drums his fingers on the partition. "Mag said it's spreading. It's on our hemisphere now." The coworker in question rolls her office chair over in between the cubicles at the sound of her name, her eyebrows lifted. Magnolia's real name is something all vowels and soft consonants that's too complicated for tongues like Eduardo's, ones that are too used to the hard sounds of the Germanic languages. So, unapologetically, she goes by her online RPG handle. She's at least a decade older than Eduardo, but she doesn't look it; short and square with a jawline like a picture frame.

"Yes," says Lin Yao, a little more somber. "There's a lot of conflicting information, but it looks that way. I hope it doesn't come here," he tugs on the rubbers of his sick-mask.

"We're cleanlier here," says Mag immediately, and straightens her shoulders with a hike of her chin, adding in a firm voice, "We're Singapore, not the States. We know how to take care of ourselves and as a nation, we don't give into mass hysteria. We'll be fine."

Lin Yao makes a noise in the back of his throat. Eduardo's pretty sure hysteria is a human condition and isn't confined to one particular geographical area, but he still has non-resident status and Magnolia's family has been living here since the nineteenth century, so he'd lose that argument by default.

"Yes," says Lin Yao, just a beat too late. He's preoccupied now, turning to his computer, and Eduardo can guess why: he met a woman online not too long ago, before even the first strains of this (he assumes) highly contagious flu started appearing in New York last month. She's from Alabama, so he probably won't rest until he knows that America isn't going to fall into the ocean tomorrow, no matter how gleeful he gets at the sight of the country as a whole behaving poorly.

His fingers jitter over the keyboard, plainly eager to tab over and sign into Zoosk (or Facebook to check his inevitable flood of birthday messages) but unwilling to do it with Mag and Eduardo hovering right there.

Eduardo rolls his eyes, but pushes away from the partition and goes back to his office.

Dropping into his chair, he spins around in a lazy circle, and then faces front again, one-handedly opening a new tab. He pulls up Google News and scans the headlines, which seem to be an eclectic mix of theories about this super-flu and what it means now that it's confirmed to have jumped continents, and the assorted general news stories fronted by networks that haven't seemed to have clued in yet, which includes the death of an Iranian peace activist and an announcement about a new upcoming project from Mark Zuckerberg, which makes Eduardo run hot and cold, same as it always does. The preview blurb mentions something about Zuckerberg having seemed withdrawn recently, and how this signals a comeback, but Eduardo doesn't click on the 'read more.'

He checks his bottom desk drawer, rummages until he finds his mask. It's still in its box, black with the Tasmanian Devil printed on it, a relic from the bird flu scare that had hopped to the continent from Japan when Eduardo was still new here. His other choice had been a Hello Kitty one.

Maybe he'll actually take it out and wear it on the subway home, if he gets nervous enough.

-

The epidemic moves too fast for bureaucracy to keep up.

Governments that have stood for centuries topple in a matter of weeks. Reliable news becomes nonexistent, corroded from the inside out, and with it, the lightning-fast information exchange dries up. Civil, legislative, and judicial protocol becomes obsolete, because what the fuck does paperwork matter when it's possible that you will die before you're finished filling out a form?

Eduardo watches all of this happen, sitting on somebody's abandoned desk in the middle of the cubicle forest, listening to Magnolia rattle off conflicting Twitter updates. They come in to work because they have nowhere better to be, but there's nothing to work on. Their supervisors were among the first to vanish, their clients immediately thereafter.

"Well," says Lin Yao at the end of the day, grim-faced and fastening his mask on over his face. "Try not to die overnight, guys."

"Yeah, you too," they tell him, but only a few days later, he stops coming, leaving just four of them: Eduardo, Magnolia, a sales rep from two floors down who got ruthlessly divided from her family when they fell ill, and the janitor, who speaks a version of Singlish so bastardized that Eduardo has more or less given up communicating with him about anything more complicated than "how are you feeling?" and "still have my mind, thank you."

The electrical grid stays standing despite a dwindling healthy population, and the subways keep running, so they keep on coming into work, because this is Singapore. It bore British imperial rule for a century and a half, and can keep calm and carry on with the best of them.

"You know," offers Mag, drawing it out thoughtfully and watching Eduardo peel back the plastic wrap on a microwavable plate of noodles. "If ... if you have nowhere to go ..."

Eduardo looks up at her. None of them have anybody waiting for them at home, that's kind of why they're here.

"Well, I have a apartment with three bolt locks, so if you wanted to, you could come stay with me until things quiet down," she finishes.

He looks over his shoulder. The sales rep -- who he's pretty sure immigrated here from the Horn of Africa earlier this year, but he doesn't know her name and is too embarrassed to ask, because he thinks it's probably something he should know -- doesn't hesitate before she nods.

"I would like that very much," she says. She has bruised eyes, the whites of them stained through with a color like persimmons.

Magnolia nods back, and looks at the janitor, who tugs at the whiskers on his chin and offers something in Mandarin that makes Mag laugh, a startled hiccup of a sound.

"That would be nice," she says. "Please bring all the guns."

"Yes," the janitor agrees, and they nod an accord.

But when she looks at him, Eduardo shakes his head. "I have a panic room, I'll be okay," he tells her, and it's not an excuse, he really does; it's left over from the days before he learned to channel his anger into something nonviolent. It's been years since he had a fit like that, but the room stays there, a quiet, dark space accessible through the bathroom, a lockbox into which he puts all his insecurities and ugly memories.

Magnolia studies him for a moment, and then she squeezes his shoulder.

"I hope they come find you," she says, and he blinks at her for a moment before he realizes that she doesn't mean they as in the infected, but they as in his family -- the only people who would come to Singapore looking for him.

They only have the one address, after all.

So that's where Eduardo's going to stay.

The next day, when he goes into the office, he pushes one of the chairs over to the window and sits at it, watching the clouds and the movement of the people far down on the sidewalk -- they hurry through the patches of shade and keep their heads down in the sunlight. Nobody takes their masks off, and so from a high-up vantage point, they all look strangely alien with those amorphous things attached to their faces. Nobody else comes in.

-

It started in America.

That's the only thing anybody can pinpoint with any accuracy. In May, a person simply referred to as Ground Zero climbed into the back of a New York taxi cab and then sneezed.

So that was that.

The leading theory is that it started with a mutated breed of fly, one of those annoying kinds that will survive being swatted not once, but twice, still twitching and crawling across flat surfaces, sans guts and legs and even heads. Mutated from what is anybody's guess, but they reckon is has something to do with a particular allele that transfered from the fly to those it bit: it started out as a blood-born disease, interestingly enough.

It jumped from the fly to monkeys, from monkeys to domesticated dogs, and from domesticated dogs to Ground Zero. From Ground Zero, it made the evolutionary leap to becoming airborne. From there, it spread terrifying fast: too fast for CDC, too fast for toxicologists to keep up, too fast for the average human immune system to even realize what was going on. Within forty-eight hours, it goes from incubatory to fatal, and the victims are awarded a single moment of clear lucidity before they flatline, which is always the worst part.

One sneeze in New York causes a hurricane to bear down on the world.

One sneeze, and within two months, Eduardo Saverin learns how to shoot people in the face.

-

In June, America declares a state of national emergency, and starts a quarantine policy immediately thereafter.

New York City is the first to get shut down -- it's easiest to control the flow of people coming in and off of Long Island, after all, but after that, the government has to stretch its armed forces incredibly thin as, one-by-one, it becomes most expedient just to isolate each major metro hub. Blockades dot every highway and every flight gets rerouted to the outlying airfields, where everybody is meticulously scanned for symptoms of the virus; those infected are then separated from their companions, without ceremony or a chance at good-bye.

L.A. goes next -- Eduardo sees the announcement as a scrolling marquee on the subway and feels the chill of it settle uncomfortably in his stomach. Then, Chicago. Detroit and Boston.

June 21, 2011, and the virus makes another astonishing feat of evolution, and mutates again. The first corpse sits bolt upright in a camp within the city borders of Balitmore. Like the fly that just won't die no matter the damage done to it, it crawls across the autopsy table, its unhinged maw gaping hungrily open. It kills one coroner and three aid workers before they blow its head off its shoulders with a pulse charge.

If you have loved ones within the affected areas, broadcasts every American television station, every radio show, every dot-gov website. Do not try to contact them at this time.

They are beyond your reach.

They cannot be helped until such a time that a vaccination or a cure can be arranged. Thank you for understanding.

And then, June 24, 2011. London reports its first case; a window-washer whose son attends American university faints at work and plummets twenty-five stories to the pavement below, where his body bursts open on impact, splattering fourteen pedestrians with viscera and infected blood.

June 25. A woman in Tokyo dies on the City Local train and then rises again, going for the jugular of her neighbor, all before the train even reaches its next stop.

Three days after Lin Yao's birthday, a little girl who could not have been a day over twelve walks into a hospital in the eastern Jurong district with red-shot eyes and a runny nose, and dies before a doctor can make room in his schedule to see her. She is Singapore's first official death. Her name is Vera.

-

You know, there aren't really words that do it justice; what it's like to look at that list of quarantined cities as it grows and grows and realize that everyone you know who lives there is dead, or will shortly be dead, or has been given up for dead. You will never see them again, you will never talk to them again, you will never be able to remember them without immediately remembering that they're gone.

Eduardo stands in front of the flat-screen television in the faceless lobby of his office building, eyes ticking over city name after city name, and grief knots hard at that soft spot directly under his ribs.

He knows so many people.

New York, New York.

Good-bye Mr. Wenninghoff, the portly, friendly, toad-looking man who gave Eduardo that internship. Good-bye Christy, his ex-girlfriend, who hates him for the exact same reasons he hates Mark Zuckerberg; hindsight is 20/20 and thinking he used to be that person still makes him cringe. Good-bye Eitan, who stuck close to Eduardo throughout their Phoenix Club pledges and transfered to Columbia the following semester. Good-bye to that cashier from the deli where Eduardo used to grab breakfast before dawn; her eyes, in certain lights, had been violet.

Los Angeles, California.

Good-bye, Sean Parker, sorry that not even your paranoia can protect you against the flu.

Boston, Massachusetts.

Good-bye, Harvard. Good-bye, Mr. Summers, and your horribly contradictory graduation speeches. Good-bye, Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, sorry you never got a chance to compete in the London Olympics. Good-bye, Erica Albright and Billy Olsen and the man with the salt-and-pepper mustache who whistled Blue Danube as he vacuumed in between the stacks at Widener.

Chicago, Illinois.

Good-bye, Julia, who sat behind him in World History in high school and got a full-ride to Notre Dame. Good-bye, the democratic representative from Yemen who Eduardo talked to on the phone at work three weeks ago. Good-bye, Patricia, the campaign intern who wanted him to re-elect the president for the upcoming term -- he remembers he had just let her keep talking, unwilling to inform her that he didn't have American citizenship any more than he had Singaporean citizenship, and instead just promised his vote.

London, England, United Kingdom.

Good-bye, landscape artist who once sat next to Eduardo on a flight that one time, whose name he'll never know.

The entire Bay Area, California, from San Francisco to San Jose.

Good-bye, Capcom International and all the business associates his firm had there. Good-bye, everybody at Apple and the Googleplex and Amazon and Yahoo. Good-bye, Dustin -- did anybody ever remember to get you a T-Rex cake for your birthday, the way you confessed you really wanted that one time? Good-bye, Chris and Chris's boyfriend (Eduardo never did learn his name.) Good-bye, Mark Zuckerberg, it's weird to think that you're dead and Eduardo is not.

Paris, Buenos Aires, Brasilia.

Toronto, Seattle, Mecca, and Mumbai.

All the faces of all the people Eduardo has ever met, talked to, yelled at on the television, read about on the Internet, all present there behind his eyelids; a hundred, a thousand, five hundred million people, dead or sick or unaccounted for.

And then.

And then there's Singapore; a city so prosperous that it declared itself its own country and succeeded. It's the second most densely-populated nation in the world after Monaco, and when all other big cities go dark and fade into static, it stays standing, the last megalopolis stronghold on the Eurasian continent.

Six years ago, Eduardo followed a job offer that came right on the heels of the tsunami, and became one more face lost among the hundred thousand refugees from the Indonesian islands, and he never left.

Singapore is home. It's the most amazing place he's ever been, he'll admit it, and that's even including the post-graduation trip he took to see the Grand Canyon at sunrise, and that includes the Harvard CS lab, with Mark Zuckerberg standing across from him with a $18,000 check in his hands and a look on his face that Eduardo cannot, to this day, describe. Singapore makes him feel even more amazing than those things.

He stays.

-

For lack of anything more appropriate, or maybe as a last-ditch attempt at end-of-the-world humor, the term "zombie" gets coined to describe the reanimated corpse of an epidemic victim.

Eduardo isn't sure if that makes all the zombie lore a premonition, or a self-fulfilling prophecy. Were the Zombie Walk enthusiasts and the survivalists and the organic food proponents right and it was always inevitable, or did the zombie apocalypse happen because if you treat something like it's inevitable, then it will be?

-

And then it breaks.

-

He wakes up in the middle of the night to the sound of someone on his floor screaming.

He hears it loud and piercingly clear, coming through his propped-open window, which distorts his attempt to orient which direction it's coming from. He jolts upright, sleep-dazed and blinking.

For a moment afterwards, everything is quiet: he can hear the soft rustle of the overhanging creeping plants from the apartment above as the wind stirs them. He's too far up off the ground to hear the sounds of the streets -- the near-constant pulse of the ambulance siren, the police patrolling in their slow-moving vans with their automated quadrilingual broadcast summoning all personnel who think they might be infected or who have been in contact with the infected to please report for vaccination.

'Vaccination,' of course, being the loosest translation of the word. The sales rep who saw her entire family taken said they simply line them up in the police station and shoot them as a precaution, since it's the quickest way to stop them from rising postmortem.

Wait, no, there! He wasn't imagining it.

The scream comes again, high and eerily distinguishable in the middle of the night, a woman's voice canted up on a single syllable.

If it's a word she's trying to scream, she never gets to finish it: it goes muffled, then quiet again, and Eduardo's rolling out of bed before his brain catches up to what the rest of him is doing. He pads through his apartment in the dark, scooping up a heavy-duty hammer that's been lying out on one of his bookshelves for months, a leftover from a bathroom renovation project that never did go anywhere beyond the contemplation stages.

He flips the lock on his door and goes out into the hall. It's only half-lit; a decision on part of the apartment supervisors in a bid to preserve what little electricity is left.

"Hello?" he calls, looking left, then right. "Hey, are you all right? Um --" he doesn't really know how to ask the same question in any of the other common languages, so he just settles for cycling through "hello?" in each of them.

He gets as far as the stairwell before he hears it: the sound of something going thump and a long, slow drag of a heavy thing going across a carpet. It's a suspicious noise at the best of times, but at the end of the world, it's downright hair-raising. Eduardo tightens his grip on his hammer, keeping still and listening hard.

Behind him, a door opens, and he spins around.

As far as first encounters with zombies go, there probably isn't really any okay way for it to happen, but standing here and realizing he is watching the reanimation of some poor woman's corpse sends his brain gibbering right out of his head in panic. She looks fresh; her hair freshly-washed and tangled around her shoulders, her skin still the color of pale beans, but her eyes have milked over and there's blood flecking her mouth.

Blood-born again? he finds himself thinking, like he isn't staring down a corpse who is now looking at him with the dawning realization that Eduardo is fresh meat. In the name of expediency, did it mutate from airborne back to ... because they bite, and it kills pretty much immediately. Zombie-manufacturing virus.

Oh holy shit, I'm dead, he thinks immediately after, and swings the hammer.

Eduardo never did sports in high school -- he was more of an AcaDeca, Chess Club, math geek type -- so the blow goes wide, and the once-a-woman sidesteps it easily. She throws him a look that is, for a zombie, incredibly unimpressed, and maybe this is why Eduardo could never keep a significant other. Do you think maybe it's one of those things that's imprinted on the human genome, to try and find a mate that you know can protect you against the zombie apocalypse?

"Shit," says Eduardo, because this is why he will die alone.

The zombie bares her teeth triumphantly; her gums are lacerated and bleeding.

And then --

"Duck!" comes a yell from down the hall, and Eduardo doesn't even think before he hits the carpet, hands flying to cover his head. He's never heard a gunshot up this close before; it's terrifyingly loud, and he will never, ever, for as long as he lives, forget what it's like to hear the bullet hit skin, hit muscle, hit bone. The woman drops to the carpet, ungainly; bits of her blood fleck the backs of Eduardo's shaking hands.

"Okay, get up," says the voice; a hand now, under his elbow, thick blunt nails and a heavy ring that reminds him of his father's, hauling him up. "I like it better when their heads explode. Sometimes a bullet to the brain isn't enough, remember that."

"Right," goes Eduardo, and manfully refrains from passing out from residual terror until they're behind a locked door once again.

-

His rescuer's name is Charlie. At least, that's how he introduces himself when Eduardo comes to, waiting to hand him a piping-hot cup of jasmine tea, complete with a neat slice of lemon clinging to the lip of the cup. The way he says it makes Eduardo think of the way Dustin used to tell the girls at parties that he was the Dustinator -- it sounds more like a code name than anything Eduardo's going to find on the guy's birth certificate.

Eduardo knows him, vaguely; they've passed each other once or twice coming in and out of the elevator. He lives two doors down.

He's on the older side of forty; his hairline is receding and he has a pair of reading glasses that he keeps tucked into the breast pocket of his ski jacket. He's a poly-Asian mix of ethnicities that Eduardo can't distinguish from each other just by looking at him. He was born and raised in Hong Kong, he says, and his apartment has the dusty, caught-in-amber neatness of a frequent traveler.

"What do you do for a living?" Eduardo asks him for the sake of politeness, squeezing the lemon into his tea.

"I'm an assassin," Charlie answers pleasantly.

Eduardo chokes.

Coughing, he winces his way through the taste of lemon going out his nose, and pounds on his chest until he gets his air back. Charlie waits, his expression mild, and then offers him a smile when he looks up, incredulous.

"There's an official term for it, of course, that I use when I'm filling out my taxes, but assassination is basically what it amounts to," he continues. He waves a hand around, encompassing the apartment. "Technically, this is just one of my crashpads; it's not really built for long-term residence. It's not uncommon for people of my profession to have places like this; Singapore is a great place to hide."

This, actually, is true: 42% of Singapore's population has some form of non-resident status, like Eduardo, so they disappear seamlessly, two foreign faces in a sea of them.

Gingerly, Eduardo takes another sip of his tea.

"I was on assignment, but both my mark and my employers were picked off by the virus early on, and I just didn't see the point in returning to base to get a new one, so," he spreads his palms open, as if to say, here I am.

"I ... didn't know any of that," Eduardo manages; he's sitting on the sofa of a professional killer wearing only his boxers. It's not the most dignified meeting he's ever been a part of, and that's even generously including the ones Zuckerberg fucked up for him, way back in New York.

"There's really no point in keeping it a secret anymore, now is there?" Charlie acknowledges, his lips quirked wryly. "And I would like at least one person to know the truth; it's the most precious commodity I have left."

He's considerate enough to let Eduardo finish his tea, which he does in slow, grateful sips. His head throbs dully; leftover from the adrenaline of almost being kabobed by a member of the walking undead or a souvenir from hitting the carpet like a spineless ton of bricks, he doesn't know, but the warmth of the tea helps. The longer he sits here, bare knees pressed together, the more embarrassed he feels about his behavior. Eduardo is a Saverin, Saverins do not faint.

When finished, he sets the teacup down on the coffee table. Charlie turns to him again.

"If you don't mind my asking," he starts. "What are your plans for surviving what's coming?"

"I beg your pardon?"

"She's not going to be the last zombie you have the pleasure of meeting," Charlie continues, gesturing towards the door. "Even Singapore will teeter and fall and be overrun, and they've already infiltrated where we live. How long do you think we're going to have? I want to know just how you plan on holding them at bay with that sissy baseball swing of yours."

"Hey," Eduardo protests, without much heat, because he has a point. Eduardo's skill set runs the gauntlet of mathematics, finances, and talking nice with people much more powerful and influential than he is: it's not the kind of skill set that keeps you alive in case of zombie apocalypse.

"I have a panic room," he says, after a beat.

Charlie smiles; there are, surprisingly, laugh lines that cut into the corners of his eyes.

"So do I," he says.

-

It's not a panic room so much as it's a stainless steel, reinforced armory, accessible through the back of the walk-in pantry.

"You underestimate exactly what I meant when I said this was a crashpad," says Charlie, wry, watching Eduardo squint against the strip-wall lighting, his eyes then going enormous as he realizes what he's looking at. There's a whole selection of guns propped up on hooks on the wall, the same way some men like to hang up deer heads, sleek and black and deadly-looking, ranging from long-range sniper rifles to simple handguns with the silencers attached. "It's a safe house for me to regroup and reload. We keep it well-stocked."

Well-stocked is a good way of putting it. In addition to the guns, Charlie has a comprehensive first-aid kit and a whole stack of boxes, filled with chalky high-fiber protein bars and vitamin water.

"You really are set for the end of the world," he says admiringly.

"Yes," Charlie admits. "I'll survive, I imagine. Now," and he crosses the room, studying the guns before picking up a semi-automatic. "This one will do; it doesn't have as bad a recoil as some of the others. Do you want to learn how to use it?"

Eduardo thinks of the noise it made, bullet breaking apart that zombie's skull and burying itself deep into her brain, the blood that's dried into flecks on the backs of his hands. He thinks of how helpless he felt, watching her approach with blood in her teeth. He's no use to his family if he doesn't survive to see them again.

"Yes, please," he says, and holds out his arms for the gun.

-

They lock the doors and shutter the windows. Eduardo's antsy about leaving his apartment unattended -- the whole reason he turned down Mag's invitation to hole up and hide was so that his family could find him -- but in the end, he just sticks a post-it underneath his room number indicating where he can be found, should anyone come looking for him.

After that, they don't leave, not for anything. At night, when the sounds outside the door become too horrible to bear for a second longer, they tell each other stories: Eduardo still has dozens of good ones about Harvard, about the mistakes he made when he first moved to Singapore and met the culture shock (including the story about how he went into work on National Day, which makes Charlie cramp up in his bunk, he's laughing so hard,) and even, at one quieter point, about Facebook.

"Don't take this the wrong way," Charlie says, at the end of that saga. "But I kind of already knew that about you."

Eduardo cuts a glance in his direction, quizzical.

"You're not exactly a nobody, Eduardo."

He snorts at that. "I am now."

With all the patience of an elementary school teacher, Charlie first teaches Eduardo how to shoot; how to brace his feet and absorb the kickback of a police-grade handgun, and an ornate silvery gangster's pistol, then a shotgun, then a rifle. Eduardo's long arms fit the shotgun best, timberwood grip slotting neatly into the cradle of his shoulder. He resists the urge to make a Clampett family joke every time he successfully puts a bullet into the target ring.

They pass the worst of it this way; Charlie coaching and Eduardo learning. He picks things up fast, always has, and it's especially helpful in this scenario.

A love of dystopian fiction on long international flights turns out to be something they have in common, so between the two of them, they have a piecemeal understanding of what kind of world they can expect when they next set foot outside those doors. In addition to basic marksmanship, Eduardo learns how to pick locks and how to wrap a shirt around a bar of soap or a brick and use it as a slingshot to break through windows.

"It's necessary," says Charlie grimly, the second time broken glass slices into Eduardo's wrists. "By now, the zombies probably count as the dominant species on this planet, so you're going to have to carrion supplies from the dead for the rest of your life."

"That will work for awhile," Eduardo agrees. "But even stockpiled canned goods and vacuum-sealed rations have an expiration date."

"Yes," says Charlie, and they don't discuss it further.

He teaches Eduardo how to hotwire a car, which Eduardo tried to do once on a dare his senior year. That was the first time he wound up in county lock-up -- not his finest moment -- so he's determined to get it right this time around.

(Strangely, Charlie also puts a concentrated effort into making sure that Eduardo knows the differences between American-made cars and all others, which Eduardo doesn't get, since there aren't exactly a lot of those in Singapore, but he goes along with it.)

It is weeks of dawn-to-dusk training before Eduardo shows noticeable signs of improvement, the motions becoming life-savingly reflexive, and he can't help the flare of pride that warms the pit of his chest when Charlie holds up a cut-out of Charlie Chaplin from a poster in the guest bedroom with a bullet right between his eyes and says, with genuine warmth, "Excellent work, kid."

It's not easy -- not for Eduardo, and not for Charlie, who doesn't want to give up the secrets of his trade very easily.

It costs him a lot to be as honest as he is, even Eduardo can see that, and a part of him wants to repay that in some way. Which is why, one night, after Charlie pours him a congratulatory glass of wine (they've been trying not to run the sinks for fear of attracting attention to themselves, so the glass is spotty as all get out, but Eduardo accepts it anyway, because alcohol is alcohol,) he finds himself blurting out something he's never really told anyone, not in so many words.

"I'm gay, you know," he says, because Charlie's right: there isn't a lot of mystery to Eduardo Saverin, and this is one of the secrets he still has left to own up to.

Cut off mid-conversation, Charlie blinks at him.

"As a parade," Eduardo clarifies. "As daisies and sunshine and squirrels and chipmunks. Gay as all those things. That's me." It's one of those things that didn't really occur to him to wonder about, not for the longest time. For the good portion of his adolescence and young adulthood, he just worked under the assumption that he hadn't found a girl good enough for him yet. Then, upon realizing the astounding arrogance of that thought, flipped to the other extreme, trying to find a woman he could pretend to be good enough for. He was, as they say, a bit oblivious.

Charlie absorbs this, putting the bottle down on the carpet and giving Eduardo one long once-over. "Really?" he goes, a little disbelievingly. "You look completely normal."

Eduardo tries not to resent that. He reminds himself that Charlie comes from a completely different generation, learning how to stereotype coming out of the cradle, and so he squares his shoulders.

"Funny," he deadpans. "We usually do."

After a pause, Charlie says, "You do know it's illegal here, right?"

You're an assassin, Eduardo thinks at him exasperatedly. I never thought you guys would be the closed-minded type.

"Wow, look at us," he says out loud, so acidly he could strip the paint from the walls. "Aren't we a pair of hardened criminals."

Whatever's going on in Charlie's head, this finally manages to break through it, because he tilts his head and gives a sardonic smile, like he's just now realizing how hypocritical it would be to judge Eduardo on his life choices. He lifts his glass, acknowledging, and they toast on it.

-

Charlie has good wine, rose-colored and thick.

Eduardo likes Charlie a lot. He likes the wine more, sometimes, but he really does like Charlie.

-

Finally, though, he has to ask.

"Why are you teaching me all this?"

Charlie pauses in the middle of demonstrating how to strip and clean the long-range sniper rifle, which he calls Cherry in tones of deep affection. Slowly, he puts it back down on its stand and regards Eduardo thoughtfully.

"Well," he says, after a beat. "These are the most basic skills you'll need in order to survive in whatever world we'll find outside the door. You certainly aren't intending on staying here in the peninsula, are you?"

"I'm not?"

"Of course not," Charlie sounds confident. When Eduardo just levels a look at him, the corner of his mouth quirks. "If the people you love don't come to you, then you must go to them, and that's exactly what you're going to do."

-

"Why me?" Eduardo asks at another point.

"Why you what?"

"Why did you pick me?" he pushes his chair around, leaning forward to prop his elbows up on his knees. "You could have left me at the mercy of our neighbor and just locked yourself into this room and not come out again until we were all dead. Of all the people you could have rescued and took under your tutelage, why me?"

He doesn't think he's going to get an answer, but he waits anyway, watching the muscles shift in Charlie's back as he works.

When he answers, it's when Eduardo least expects it.

"You were the only one who came when she screamed." He turns his head, meeting Eduardo's gaze head-on, and there's something fathomless in that look. "That's why I really fucking want you to live, kid. A woman, screaming, obviously in pain and terrified, and you were the only one that came to see if she was okay."

-

It's some messy, endless bit of time in the middle of July when the news reaches them through the grapevine: there's a flight out of Singapore for anyone who can make it and tests clean of infection. They're going to shut down the airport after that, because there aren't enough people left to run it properly, but this last flight is heading towards --

"Miami!" Charlie says triumphantly, all but buzzing his way around the apartment. "Mr. Saverin, it's time to leave the nest. We are getting you on this plane!"

It's been almost an entire month since Eduardo was last outside; they dress him in clean, sturdy clothes -- jeans and a jacket with deep-well pockets, the last remaining shirt and undershirt that they have, and sneakers meant for covering long distances at great speed. Charlie has him hotwire a car right out on the sidewalk as practice. Eduardo's not sure what he was expecting; dead bodies heaped up on every corner or zombies wandering helter-skelter in every direction, but it's none of those things.

Everything is quiet and still, and for Singapore, that's about twenty times worse.

The expressway is quiet, too, cars parked messily on both sides of the roads. Some still have their doors hanging open, like their owners simply forgot that they left the stove on but intended to return. They skirt around those without a word.

At the airport, Charlie hands him a carry-on, full of miscellaneous, innocent-looking parts that can, in case of in-flight emergency, be assembled into a rifle, which makes Eduardo feel kind of badass, like some grown-up version of the kid with the coolest Transformer toy; during one of their long insomniac streaks, Charlie had him do exactly that, twelve times in a row. Eduardo says thank you, and holds onto the handle so hard his knuckles go white.

They hold each other's eyes.

"Fuck, kid," says Charlie emphatically, and embraces Eduardo hard, pounding him on the back like he's trying to hammer the imprint of his fist into Eduardo's bones.

Eduardo leans into it, just for a moment.

PART TWO: Florida

Approximately twenty-seven people make it out of Singapore that day.

He needn't have worried about the carry-on: there's nobody left to give two shits about airport security, and they would all rather part with a minor internal organ than give up their weapons. It's the only reason they've survived thusfar, and they have the common sense not to use them mid-flight, because that's not going to end well for anyone.

Two of the people on the plane have never flown before; they're an elderly couple who tuck their machetes into the overhead bin, casual as anything. They're going to America to look for their son. Since there aren't any flight attendants, just the pilot who arranged the flight and his friend up in the cockpit, Eduardo and a couple of the other frequent flyers try to reenact the preflight song and dance routine for them in some messy, mismatched mix of Singlish and Malay, standing up in the aisle with fake-bright smiles and clumsily demonstrating how to use the oxygen mask.

It's so surreal, and they're so bad at it, that for five minutes, at least, everyone is laughing.

Technically, the fastest way to reach America would be to head for the West Coast, because it's closer, but it's the wrong time of the year to attempt to cut straight across the Pacific Ocean, so they go the long way instead, skirting the Nepalese mountains and keeping high above the cloud cover.

It's a twenty-six hour flight, and they stop to refuel at an airstrip in the deserted southern portion of Kazakhstan, where it's so desolate that even the zombies have had a hard time gaining any momentum. There's one that comes poking around while the plane refuels, and everybody gleefully draws straws on who gets to blow it to smithereens.

They're chasing the sun, heading backwards in time, so it's still technically the same day when they descend into Miami and the pilot comes onto the intercom. Eduardo all but shivers in anticipation in his seat: he is this close to finding his family. This close to seeing them again.

And then what the pilot says guts him completely.

They're going to have to reroute, the pilot says.

The city's uninhabited, the pilot says.

There are no survivors, the pilot says.

There's an abandoned airfield just a couple miles to the north in a city called Lake Worth, which Eduardo only vaguely remembers from family car trips to Orlando when he and his siblings were little. They land there instead, leaving via the emergency exit since there's no one to pull them up to a gate or bring a staircase over. At the bottom of the slide, everyone goes their separate ways, off to find whoever it is they came to America to find.

The first thing Eduardo does when he puts his feet on American soil again is to sit down on the pavement and cry.

Great, wet, choking sobs that shudder through his chest like they're punching each individual breath right out of him. There's no one around to see him do it; all his fellow passengers, his last links to the country he came from, are now just fading silhouettes in the distance, but Eduardo can't bring himself to move. There's nobody to move for.

He grieves for his mother.

He grieves for his father.

His grieves for his sister, his brothers, his cousins, his aunts and uncles and his nephew, his family, his friends, and his home.

Slowly, as it sinks in that that's it, he's never going to see them, talk to them, or embrace them ever again, their faces slip from his mind, easy as water flowing out of his cupped hands, and he lets them go.

-

Two nights later, he gets cornered at the end of a football field by some abandoned Lake Worth high school that Eduardo didn't catch the name of. There are five of the undead fuckers, and Eduardo's out of live rounds and doesn't have time to open another box and reload before they'd be on him.

Clenching his flashlight in his jaw, he hefts himself up the bleachers, sliding into the maze of metal bars underneath them.

It slows the zombies down, since they're too stupid to determine where to put their limbs in order to follow him, but when Eduardo swings the flashlight back, they roar in unison as the beam catches over their faces and redouble their efforts. One of them dislocates its shoulder with a sickening pop, saliva dripping down its chin.

Heart pounding, he crouches down on the cement and fumbles in his pocket for the box of ammo. His hands are shaking too badly to pick and pull at the piece of tape that holds the box closed. It doesn't want to come up.

"Are you fucking kidding me," he breathes out, and curses all the generations of manufacturers who considered it a good idea to create packaging too difficult to open in emergencies.

Giving up on the tape, he hooks his fingers around the lid and tries to rip the box open. That works better; it's just cardboard, and it tears right along the seam, sending rounds scattering in every direction, pinging against the cement with a sound like breaking glass. Eduardo's brain whites out with panic, just as a zombie looms up to his right, way way way too close.

He swings his gun up, fingers pulling at the trigger unthinkingly -- to his immense surprise, the zombie's head explodes with the impact of a bullet, sending clumps of blood and brain matter all across Eduardo's face and chest.

"You idiot!" comes a voice from the other side of the bleachers, and with a muffled boom, another zombie bites the dust. The others shuffle around, confused and threatened. "They follow the light!"

Still clenching the flashlight between his teeth, Eduardo pushes it out of his mouth with his tongue and fumbles for it, hitting the switch and plunging them into darkness.

"Don't do that!" shrieks the voice. It's a woman's, dark with a cadence he ... recognizes. What's going -- "Now I can't see what the fuck I'm doing, you son of a bitch!"

She doesn't even get all the way through her expletive before Eduardo's flicking the light back on, dazing the zombies who swing around to look at it, and neatly, she dispatches two of them, boom and boom, cock and reload, and Eduardo recovers enough that when the final zombie lunges for him, he grabs his shotgun by the barrel and swings it. It meets its head with a crunch of shattering skull, and Eduardo pins it to the ground, holding it there with his thighs so he can bash its skull into pulp.

When it stops moving, he lets the shotgun drop, panting and dragging in deep lungfuls of air.

Then, from behind him --

"Eduardo?"

He spins. The woman comes closer, climbing in between the steel beams; she's carrying a deer hunter's shotgun, the butt of it chipped and dented, and she has her hair crammed up underneath a baseball cap; the ends are escaping underneath the rim. He shines the flashlight at her, and her hand flies to protect her face instinctively, but then she lowers it again.

Eduardo drops the flashlight.

"Isibel?"

She steps into his puddle of light, propping a fist up on her hip. She's dressed in a man's extra-large shirt, which bags around her figure, and the beginnings of crow's feet at the corners of her eyes are new, but he'd know her anywhere, covered in whatever muck.

"Hey, you," she goes, in Portuguese. "Aren't you supposed to be safe and sound in your cushy rich apartment on the other side of the globe?"

-

Isibel's mother is Eduardo's mother's sister. They were born six months apart, Eduardo in the winter and Isi in the summer, and when his family moved to the States, she'd just learned how to weave together the thick, weedy leaves from the banana plants that grew wild on their street in Sao Paulo, so she painstakingly made him a crown as a good-bye present. He wore it on the airplane and he wore it to their new house, even after the leaves went crisp and brittle at the edges and started to brown.

She moved to Miami when she turned eighteen to go to school. She called Eduardo frequently, even after he relocated to Singapore to bury his head in the sand, and whenever he protested about the long-distance charges, she hummed loudly until he changed the subject.

"When Miami went into quarantine, me and a couple of the Evergladers snuck past the barricades, because we weren't infected and we had no desire to be," she tells him, and when he offers her a pop-top can of tuna fish back at his psuedo-bunker by the airfield, she digs in with her fingers with the ravenous appetite of someone who hasn't had a proper meal in days. "Went looking for a plane -- something that would take us somewhere safe. Lake Worth has an airfield, right?"

Eduardo nods, then shakes his head. "Yes, but, nowhere's safe. Didn't you hear?"

Jaw working, she wipes the tuna juice off onto her pants, leaving a wet smear on the fabric without seeming to notice. It's so far from the Isi he knows, the one who had the same strict, prestigious upbringing that he did, that it leaves him blinking at her like she's a sunswept mirage.

"No?" she goes, frowning. "They cut all communications within the city when the corpses started coming back to life. We didn't hear anything."

"The virus spread," Eduardo says, and quickly looks away when something horrible and desolate cracks over her face. "It's everywhere, on every continent. There's nowhere that's safe anymore. We are officially in the middle of the zombie apocalypse."

She absorbs this, and sets the can down and to the side.

He wants to ask her about the people she escaped Miami with, about his parents, about her parents (Eduardo's aunt and uncle, he didn't even call them last holiday), about her husband who just got back from a tour overseas and her son, who was six years old and missing his two front teeth in the last picture Eduardo saw of him. But he doesn't. There's really only one reason why she'd be here without them.

"Why did you come here?" she asks him suddenly, like it's just occurred to her that he never did answer her earlier question. "Of all the places your daft little self could have flown to, why the country at the epicenter of this whole shit storm?"

It's actually one of the easiest questions she could have asked him.

"I came looking for you guys," he says, and touches their shoulders together. She sways into the contact gratefully. "If you weren't going to come to me, then I figured I had better come to you."

-

Isi's been on her own longer even than Eduardo was shut up in Charlie's hideaway, and she knows more about surviving in this landscape than he does.

Now that emigrating out of the United States is no longer an option, she reorganizes her priorities and assembles a plan. "We'll find someplace to bunker down," she tells him; they're in the Lake Worth police station, and she's measuring up the rifles they have in their armory, looking for something to replace her own with. There aren't a lot left, of course, but they'll probably have better luck finding a gun here than Cubbelo's or Army Surplus -- those places were probably raided and stripped clean on the first day.

She talks about finding other survivors and putting together some kind of refuge.

"Zombies don't like crossing running water," she rattles on. "They don't have the continence for it. And they don't like daylight, so ... we'll head back south," she decides. "There are all sorts of unpopulated islands in the Everglades, we'll find some place the zombies haven't touched yet. Where there are no zombies, we'll find people."

Eduardo grimaces. He doesn't like the idea of living out the rest of his days with mosquitos the size of chihuahuas and alligators that'll come up right to his front door.

She looks at him. "Are you with me?"

It's not even a question. "Of course I am," he says, and accepts the hug when she leans in for it.

-

To the east of Lake Worth, there's a narrow strip of land separated from the main Floridian peninsula by an inlet, which drives the zombies crazy. Isi was right, their rotting and unfettered flesh can't handle it; it's like soaking a sponge cake and expecting it to hold a shape.

There's a bridge, of course, cluttered with overturned cars and a semi truck jackknifed across both lanes, so the zombies bottleneck trying to come through. On the Palm Beach side, Isi and Eduardo can see them coming clearly, and make a sport out of popping them off, one-by-one.

She has a silver Sharpie tucked into the band of her bra, which she says she's been using to mark the mile markers.

Now they use it to keep score; one tally mark on the barrels of their guns for every kill.

Re-kill. Whatever the term for it is.

There are too many bridges to the north and the south, of course, so they can never really get comfortable. It's questionable as to whether or not the damn things can problem solve, but they're more than capable of migrating. He and Isi keep to the seaside; this side of Palm Beach is nothing but multimillion dollar homes, hotels, and golf courses; huge glass windows and manicured landscaping that is starting to look a little overgrown around the edges.

Eduardo gets to put his new lock-picking skills to use, breaking into a different McMansion each night. The burglar alarms wail at them until he finds the right wires to cut, but it doesn't matter, because there aren't any cops left to answer the call. He thought it would creep him out, wandering through somebody else's home, looking at their family portraits and browsing their DVD collections, but it doesn't.

In one, they find a stock of provisions set up right in the front foyer; a neat pyramid of canned goods, boxes of supplemental vitamins, and bottled water, topped with a neat, handwritten sign made out of folded construction paper, saying simply, GOOD LUCK.

"That's ... eerie," says Isi, but she picks up a can of artichoke hearts with something like avarice.

"Sweet," corrects Eduardo. When they search the house, they don't even find a corpse, or evidence of a violent death, so maybe whoever left the supplies took off in search of greener pastures. Or something.

Isi's right about something else, too -- the zombies hate daylight, and so they hide away until sunset. They come across a cluster of them in the poolhouse of a motel while they're looking for clean towels just a little after nine in the morning; they're sitting recumbent in a clump, their heads down on their chests, for all appearances asleep. Isi squeaks in horror, and they backtrack double-time. The zombies don't follow, but there was an easy half-dozen of them, and, with skin crawling, Eduardo and Isi try to put as much distance between them and the hide-out as possible.

Conversely, at nighttime, any source of artificial light will attract any zombie in a conceivable radius.

So, they learn what kind of places the zombies like to nest in (the darker and the damper, the better) and how to set up a perimeter to guard against the inevitable attack that comes on wherever they bunk down. The benefit of the seaside property is the tall fences and the privacy hedges; they hide themselves away, napping anxiously through the night, coming alert at every strange sound.

At dawn, they watch the sun come up over the ocean, the blood-colored ibis picking their way along the breakers and the seagulls pinwheeling in the sky.

It's as beautiful as it ever was -- animals and plantlife and the rotations of the planet earth don't care about the ravage and downfall of human civilization. The magnetosphere of the sun affects the weather patterns inside Earth's atmosphere, and Eduardo stands on the sidewalk and watches storms brew out at sea with the same wonder he always had.

Eventually, the main electrical grid runs out of juice, and one night, Palm Beach plunges into complete darkness with a humming whine he can feel in his bones.

"I forgot what the stars look like on this side of the world," Eduardo comments. Without the interference of the city lights, the night sky is littered with stars as numerous as sand on a beach. There were some good sky-watching places in northern Singapore that Eduardo sometimes went to with the dates he really wanted to impress, but even there, it wasn't anything like this.

Isi tilts her head back obediently. "I don't remember the last time I looked at the stars," she confesses, soft.

And then her thumb digs hard into his kidney.

"Ow, fuck!" Eduardo complains, flinching away. "What was that for?"

"Fuck you and the optimism you rode in on," she bitches at him. "It's the end of the world and you have me appreciating the night sky."

Her hair is greasing into clumps along her part, and there's dried blood from a cut crushing into a ridge behind her ear, which he doesn't tell her about, because he doubts he fares much better.

"I was going to bring you a gift," he tells her after a beat, his voice gone soft.

She looks at him curiously.

"I had a plane ticket, did I tell you?" he murmurs. "You were always after me about coming to visit, so one day, I just did it. I bought a ticket to come see you, and I was going to bring you something uniquely Singaporean, something you wouldn't be able to find here."

"Eduardo ..." she starts, but inspiration strikes him out of nowhere.

He shifts his shotgun into the crook of his elbow and feels around inside his pockets, digging deep into their corners. He comes up with a handful of change, which he spreads out into his palm. "Here," he manages, and picks out a ten-cent.

She takes it from him, and since he's watching, he sees the way her eyes light up when she turns it over, and she runs her thumb over the seahorse motif; it looks like it's been gilt in gold, floating amongst a seaweed bed, but really, it's just a cupronickel alloy.

"This is lovely," she murmurs. "Much better than ours, at least; all we have on our coins are a bunch of dead guys."

He laughs. "All of Singapore's coin currency have some kind of tropical fish theme to them," he tells her, just to see her smile.

"Thank you, Eduardo," she replies with quiet solemnity.

The first chance they get, they balance the ten-cent on its rim, and Isi loads the smallest-caliber bullet into the smallest pistol she can get her hands on. It takes her two tries to line up her aim properly, and then she punches a hole straight through the coin. It takes out a bit of the seahorse, but otherwise it's a perfect shot, and she loops it through a chain and wears it around her neck, beaming at him as she does.

"You know, for a measly cousin, we raised your properly," she decides.

"Excuse me!" he returns, chuckling. "You're younger than I am!"

It's the closest to happy they will ever be.

-

Strangely, Eduardo's still keeping track of the days of the week, even though there's no real point, and so he knows it's the first week of August when the unthinkable happens.

There's a fabulous house, set back from the beach and tucked behind a high stone wall that curves with the land. Isi studies it, and Eduardo's catching up to the way her mind works, because he sees where she's going with that look. "Zombies'll have trouble scaling that," he gestures to the wall.

"Mmhmm," she agrees. It's late afternoon by this point, so they decide to bunker down; it's as nice a place as any, coral-colored with high windows that'll be perfect to watch the sunrise from come morning.

Eduardo busts the lock: the electricity's mostly out for good in this part of town, so there's no further security for them to endure. They fan out through the parlor, noses wrinkling up -- the place has the familiar day-old smell of rotting corpses, so they pump live rounds into their shotguns and scope the place out.

"Damn," he hears, while he's shining a light into the pantry. "Got one over here."

It's not her holy fucking shit zombie my whole brain is crying voice, but rather her fuck shit FML I hate this one, so he lowers his shotgun and follows the sound of it, past the dining room and an end table and a painting of a field of lupines.

The corpse is in the living room; a woman, he thinks, although her fleshy bits are already sinking out of view, with dark curly hair clinging to the bits of skull that are splattered across her coffee table. The smell is twice as strong in here, but she was nice enough to leave an aerosol can of Lysol out on top of the entertainment system, so he can probably mask it for a little bit.

"She beat them to herself, look." Isi nudges at the handgun lying a short distance away with the toe of her sneaker. She bends down and picks it up, checking the chamber. "Ah, score!"

"Do you want me to --" he makes a gesture at the dead woman. She's not going to rise, but they're not going to leave her lying here, either.

"Um, I think it's my turn, but hey, if you're volunteering ..." she trails off, and when he nods, she gives him a patently grateful smile. "I'll check the roof, then, see what kind of visibility we have from here."

She leaves, and Eduardo props the shotgun up against the arm of the sofa and rolls up his sleeves.

"Okay, Eduardo Saverin," he tells himself, glancing around the room to determine where the biggest blotches of brain matter have sunk into the carpet and the upholstery. "You used to live in the dorms; you've cleaned up more caked-on mess than this. This mess just happened to have been a functioning human being once, that's all."

He raids the linen closet for a sheet to wrap the rest of the corpse up in, and as he's laying it out, he hears the heavy footfalls of Isi clambering around on the roof.

Until.

Until there's a stumble, a shriek, and a long scraping drag across the ceiling. Eduardo hears a horrible crunch out beyond the bushes and drops everything, sprinting for the patio door.

"Isi?" he demands, voice gone shrill entirely without his permission. There's a pool back here, clogged over and molding, and lazy brickwork spiraling out into the backyard like something out of the Wizard of Oz, and he scans the ground, frantically trying to locate where his cousin fell.

And -- there!

She groans, legs shifting up, and a combination of relief and the sheer absurdity of the situation almost makes Eduardo crack into laughter right there, because come on, she just fell off a roof -- that's the kind of stuff slapstick humor is made out of, except then he remembers exactly what the situation is: if she's seriously injured, then there's no one to take care of it except Eduardo, and Eduardo can't even be bothered to remember to put Neosporin on shit half the time.

"Isi?" he goes again, skidding in beside her and glancing up, trying to gauge how far she fell. "Isi, what happened, are you okay?"

She opens her mouth to reply, and coughs; it's a hard, wet sound that has his eyes jerking down to her, fear jolting electric-hot down his spine, because that's not an okay cough, that's not the cough of someone who's simply had the wind knocked out of them. He drops to his knees.

"Isi," he tries again. "Are you --"

"I'm fine," she wheezes out, her face contorted. "Fuck, though, that hurt."

There's something warm seeping into the fabric of his pants. Blinking, Eduardo lifts his knee -- and sees a dark puddle forming a halo on the brickwork.

His voice flies up an entire octave. "Isi!"

She cranes her neck, and, blinking, reaches down in order to lift up the hem of her shirt.

Eduardo sucks in a hard breath through his teeth, his ears momentarily flooding with static. The flesh of her abdomen is ruptured, misshapen, and punctured straight through by something that looks, from this angle, like a gardening spade, but he can't tell, because it's buried almost entirely out of sight, straight up into Isi's body.

"Oh," she whimpers. "Oh shit, oh shit oh shit shit shit shit shit no," and trails off with a noise that hits Eduardo hard in the gut.

"It'll be okay," he says uselessly, sliding an arm underneath her shoulders -- wait, are you even supposed to move people when they've been impaled? Oh, god, of all the myriad classes Eduardo had to take at Harvard, why couldn't it have been anything pertinent to real life? He lifts her up, half-sliding her into his lap because it has to be more comfortable than the pavement. He feels at the wound with his other hand, fingers finding a handle: it's definitely a spade.

He doesn't pull it out, because even he knows that much. Right now, it's acting as a stop-gap, and if Eduardo removes it, she's going to bleed out in record time.

"You're okay," he mutters, glancing around; he doesn't know what the fuck to do. "Oh, god, you'll be okay."

She lifts her eyes to his. Her mouth begins to curve.

"No, I'm not," she whispers. "And you know it."

"No," says Eduardo immediately. "No, no, it'll be okay, it looks like it missed all the vital things or whatever, come on, Isi, you're made of tougher shit than this."

"I can't feel my legs," she answers, completely calm.

Eduardo keens, rocking forward and then back again, lifting a hand to push her hair back from her forehead in a kneejerk need to comfort; he leaves streaks of blood behind.

"Don't you ever watch the movies, Eduardo?" she continues. She's still smiling, like this is all going to be a fabulous story later; hey, Eduardo, remember that time your cousin fell from the roof and was accidentally stabbed with a common gardening spade? Yeah, good times. "The Marine is always the first to bite the dust."

"Your husband was the Marine, though," Eduardo retorts inanely, and then thinks about it. "And he wasn't even a Marine, he was in the Air Force. You were going to go to nursing school after your son started kindergarten and you had the time. Isi, the nurses don't die in movies, they're too important."

"Well," she goes. Her face in the sunlight has gone gray and colorless as the moon. "This sucks, then."

This cannot be happening. It can't, it just simply can't. This is the zombie apocalypse, people are not allowed to die perfectly ordinary, normal, horrible deaths by doing stupid things. Of all the shit in the world that could possibly kill someone, somehow the rise of the undead seems like it should trump everything else, like, because there are zombies wandering around squawking for brains, all other potential fatalities should become less likely.

Eduardo has survived where so many others have not, and gotten himself all the way across the globe, he has found his family, and now she's going to die because she put her foot down at the wrong moment and slipped from the roof.

Her blood is as warm as spilled coffee in his lap, cooling steadily in the breeze coming up off the distant surf.

Eduardo's ribs feel like they're made of glass when he bends to press a single, trembling kiss to her forehead.

He pulls back. She follows the movement, touching the tips of her fingers to his lips. The shape of her mouth wobbles weakly, dredging up the last of her strength, and then she says the worst thing she could possibly say. "We'll see you soon, right, Eduardo?"

It's like being clotheslined, like the punch of a final club pledge, like you signed the papers!, a fatal blow, and it rips through him, splitting his heart in two and felling him so cleanly.

He doubles over her, shuddering full-body and burying his face into her hair, pressing their skulls together, hard. Still pinned against his skin, she scratches at the line of his mouth, demanding without words to hear the rest of the exchange.

It takes everything he has, every drop of Saverin pigheadedness and determination and sheer strength, just to straighten up and meet her eyes.

He says in a voice that slides away from him, "yeah, watch out," and she smiles.

When she dies, it's completely soundless, as quiet and unremarkable as drifting off into a dream. He remains there on the pavement long after his knees go numb, long after the blood stops dripping fresh from her wound, and holds her, until even the weight of her corpse becomes meaningless.

-

Her wedding had been at the tail end of August, the same summer that Eduardo had graduated summa cum laude from Harvard, as he was always meant to do.

The sun had beat relentlessly hot on the tops of their heads in the synagogue courtyard once they got out from underneath the chuppah, sunburning the groom's nose and the top of his father's balding head. They'd had a long engagement, but Isibel was four weeks pregnant when she took her vows, because they didn't see a reason to wait anymore. Eduardo had been best man, and the air had smelled like citrus and suntan lotion.

She still has the photograph in her wallet, tucked behind her Florida state driver's license and pictures of her son from when he was a baby; Isi and her husband and Eduardo with his arms around both of them. He remembers he had been so tired of smiling by that point, but you can't really tell unless you know what you're looking for. They look happy enough. He takes the picture and makes a mental note to find some kind of adhesive, maybe tape it to the inside of his carry-on.

She was never infected, so she doesn't rise. Very carefully, he arranges her out on the concrete and goes to dig her a grave, right there in some stranger's yard with the sound of the ocean crashing just beyond the bluffs, a sound so muted as to seem like whispers.

It's a task that takes him well past sunset. Eduardo pauses only long enough to light a fire in the grate by the pool.

Six feet by six feet, no cutting corners; blisters burst open on his hands, and when the first zombie to climb over those stone walls comes at him in a shambling run, Eduardo doesn't even break stride before he takes its head from its shoulders with a direct blow. The next zombie falls straight into the open grave, and Eduardo thinks about getting down in there to haul it out. He looks at the open sores on his palms and he looks at the thick, mucosal stuff that used to be the zombie's blood, and he leaves it.

Whatever, he thinks, too tired and heartsick to care.

The thing used to be human, too, and Eduardo's always had a heart big enough to be a grave.

-

He doesn't take any of his usual precautions.

Or any, really.

There's a feeling in his chest; dark, compacted, ugly anti-matter that hurts, hurts, hurts, like his blood has gone as corrosive as battery acid. His palms sting from grave-digging; he changes clothes to get out of Isi's blood, his abraded skin raw with pain and the muscles in his shoulders cramped up from the digging, unused to the work. He catches a glimpse of himself in the glass; the skin around his left armpit is permanently mottled in plum colors from the kickback of his shotgun. He doesn't bandage up his hands, just picks up his gun from the living room, reaches inside the collar of his shirt to touch the Singaporean ten-cent coin on its chain, the cupronickel seahorse in its bed of seaweed, and walks down Palm Beach till the sun bleeds out on the horizon, spreading pink viscera into the cotton-colored sky.

It's nighttime again.

Isi has been dead for one day.

Eduardo has been alone for one day.

And when the zombies stir, shambling out of their nests, he doesn't seek shelter.

He doesn't care enough to seek shelter, doesn't care enough to cover the wounds on his hands so he doesn't get infected blood in them. He walks right into them.

He makes it as far as the bridge, two Subarus and an El Dorado crumpled under the unforgiving crush of an SUV that he can't identify, standing as silent sentinels underneath the streetlights. There are two zombies poking around curiously, one wearing a varsity letter jacket and the other one too small to have belonged to someone in school yet, and Eduardo pops them off without even breaking stride.

He climbs on top of the SUV's hood, metal groaning and bending under his weight, and hauls himself onto the El Dorado after that; the bumper breaks off under his heel, taking a worn Obama '08 sticker with it.

He breathes out slowly, "Okay."

On the Lake Worth side of the bridge, they've noticed him. Eduardo scans the dark, sandy banks, the nightmare shapes moving down there, eager and urgent in turns. The bridge is lit by moonlight and one single, valiant sodium street lamp.

"Okay," he says again.

Inexplicably, his head fills, images reeling in front of his mind's eye in a kaleidoscopic tumble.

He thinks of his e-mail inbox, the flagged messages he meant to reply to, still sitting out there in cyberspace somewhere.

He thinks of the perfume he'd seen sitting on the shelf in the department store in May, before things got too bad to leave, piss-yellow and smelling a lot like the way salt water dries on your skin when you're spread out on the sand, like flowers, coconut, and bird-call. He meant to go back and buy it for his mother for her birthday.

He thinks of Christy, the way she smiled at him even when she was exhausted; they studied till it was late enough to be early, because fuck it, Harvard was never easy, and then were up early to put their respective masks on in order to face the day, jockeying for position in front of the sink, elbows turned into deadly weapons. He'd fallen in love with how she looked at him, he knows now, the waterfall toss of her hair and her eyes turning up to him.

He thinks Isibel was allergic to peanuts. Or maybe almonds.

He thinks Inception was the last movie he saw, at the cheap theaters where the lines of subtitles in Malay, Mandarin, and Tamil got so long that it blocked half the action. It turned out that the friend Eduardo saw it with went to grade school with one of the cameo actors; sat two seats to the left of him in phonetics. Granted, the guy had all of five lines, but it was still cool.

He thinks he should have kissed Mark Zuckerberg that time in the hallway; it would have been rainwater slick and sour with the taste of sleep and airplane pretzels, but it's so clear in his head, the way he would have grabbed for Mark's jaw like handholds, used it to pull him in and lick into his mouth, kamikaze with the need to destroy, or to save. Equal and opposite actions.

It burns through him, all these things, like the hot prickle of oncoming tears. He swallows it back, where the heat and pressure and airlessness in his chest turns it diamond-bright, shot as pure as prism light.

He pumps the shotgun, live round cocking into place; the reloads make an ungainly shape in his pocket.

He braces his feet on the roof of the El Dorado, adjusting his stance the way Charlie taught him. They're close enough he can see the whites of their eyes, the jewelry half-torn out of the women's ears, the men's shoelaces flapping, their maws open, putrid and rot-colored. They come, and they come, and they come.

Eduardo faces them, and feeling too much for one lonely person, screams, "Bring it, motherfuckers!" and levels the first zombie in between the crosshairs.

Its head bursts on impact, cantaloupe-colored, and Eduardo screams for all the people who didn't make it to today and does it again.

-

He doesn't intend to survive it.

So, naturally, that's exactly what he does.

-

His third day of being alone, Eduardo's on the mainland side of the bridge, hunting for a shop, or barrack, or anything that might carry more ammunition. Having never held a gun before in his life, up until Charlie put one in his hands like a newborn baby, he genuinely has no idea where to look, and in a zombie-overrun world, bullets are more valuable than food or water or shelter.

It's one in the afternoon, Florida time, and Eduardo's using a cell phone tower as a base point when, with a great heaving groan, the electricity makes a brave attempt at coming back.

Sparks fly above his head, and he ducks instinctively, shielding his face before glancing up; the satellite at the tip of the cell phone tower spins in a creaking circle.

The cable lines spark again, and the power goes out.

Pause.

Pause.

Groan. It's back on; somewhere, a power station still has enough juice to try and put the city's electrical grid back online. Towns like these, which cropped up on the outskirts of the bigger metropolises, Eduardo remembers from high school, were specifically built and planned for optimal energy conversation, and are run by computers to limit the capacity for human error. Those computers will keep trying to run the city; pump the water, keep the electricity humming, change the street lights, all of it, long after the people are gone.

And the satellite at the top of the cell phone tower is turning.

Eduardo narrows his eyes heavenward.

Do you think ...

He touches the lining of his jacket. It's Florida in August, it's too hot for a jacket, but Eduardo doesn't go anywhere without it; he needs the pockets too much to ever leave it behind. Inside the coat, there's ... no, that's his lock-picking kit, other side, then.

Yes.

He pulls out his cell phone. Blackberry. A businessman's phone; Eduardo thinks he might have known the guy, once, name of Eduardo Saverin. Had a lot going for him, in a different world.

He turned it off, he remembers, right before his flight. Habit, he supposes, and when they landed in Lake Worth, there hadn't really seemed to be any point to turn it back on again. He swipes his thumb across the screen, which doesn't do anything to stop the sun's glare, and holds down the power button. The phone buzzes to life in his hands.

His heart picks up. Above his head, the satellite swivels. If there is ever a moment to try, this would be it, before the power goes again.

He thumbs open his contact list, and his breath catches as, for the thousandth time, it occurs to him that the majority of the people in here will be dead. Aahab, Mohammad, is the first name in his address book; he recently started up a local commercial real estate company in Abu Dhabi. He had very white teeth, Eduardo recalls.

There's no point in calling people who don't live in the States, he realizes -- even if they were alive, even if their cell phones were charged, even if they answered, there's no way he'd be able to go to them, or for them to come to him.

And then it hits him.

He thumbs backwards, towards the bottom of the alphabet.

Zuckerberg, Mark.

Business phone number, cell phone number, each of them here. The home phone number is blank -- that wasn't information Eduardo particularly cared to have; he feels skeevy enough just having the cell phone number, because nothing is more embarrassing than accidentally butt-dialing your ex-best friend because you couldn't delete his number. It's still, interestingly enough, a New York area code.

It's the logical choice, Eduardo tells himself, bending his knuckle, running the pad of his thumb over the call button. It's self-preservation: he has no way of recharging this battery when it goes, so he can probably only make a couple calls, and Mark's a safe option to start with.

If Eduardo calls and Mark doesn't answer, if he's dead, then it's not like he matters enough that it's going to devastate him, not like it would if he, say, called his mother or his little brother.

However, he doesn't think for one moment that if Mark were alive, he wouldn't answer.

He's strangely reliable like that.

He hits Call, and lifts his phone to his ear.

The static is horrific, like that moment you hit the wrong combination of buttons on the remote and find a TV station sending the wrong signal, that thunderous burst of noise. Eduardo makes enough long-distance calls as a part of his job that he knows he has the best phone service provider, but he's out on roaming charges on this side of the globe. He glances up at the satellite dish -- he could probably wire it to send a better signal, he thinks. That's just math. He's good at math.

Then.

Then the impossible happens.

"Hello?"

-

You fucking cockroach, Eduardo thinks, with no small amount of admiration, because of course, of course, of all the people in the world, of course Mark Zuckerberg would be the one of the survivors.

-

"Mark," he says, and in the space of time it takes to get from one end of the name to the other, the relief careens into him like the blowback of centrifugal force, going sunspot-bright and supernova inside of him.

It almost takes the ground out from underneath him, because he's not expecting it. He's not expecting just how wonderful it is to hear Mark's voice, not after so long of just accepting that he was probably dead.

The joy of it might possibly kill him, he thinks.

Oh.

Oh.

"-- do?" comes through the static, tinny and too quiet for him to make much meaning out of it. "Eduardo, is that you?"

It does fell him, then, and no one's around to see Eduardo sink to his knees. He shields his eyes with his hand and drags in a shuddering breath. There's someone else alive out there. Eduardo is not alone.

Eduardo is not alone.

"Mark," he says, and fishes around for something to say, anything that's going to encompass the multitude of things that Eduardo is feeling right now. In his ear, the static rises into a high whine like he's passing through a valley. He cranes his neck backwards; the satellite dish is facing the wrong way. "Mark."

"-- do," comes through, even fainter than before. "Wardo, where are you?"

Just like that, the elation of the moment rushes straight out of him, because ... because it's almost worse, now, knowing that Mark's alive, because what the fuck can Eduardo do about it? Eduardo's in Florida. Mark is ... actually, who the fuck knows where Mark is, maybe Mark ditched California the same way Eduardo ditched Singapore, it's not outside the realm of possibility. Maybe Mark was somewhere else entirely when the epidemic hit. He could be holed up anywhere on the globe.

So even if Eduardo were somehow able to circumvent the hey, remember that time when we basically tried our best to make each other's lives miserable? conversation, what's the likelihood that they will be able to reach each other?

Eduardo is right back where he started, only now he gets to wonder, every day for the rest of his life, if Mark is dead yet.

Still. Still, it's hardwired into him to answer: that, at least, will never change.

"Lake Worth," he says as soon as the satellite turns the right way again, static dying away to a barely-audible hum, and since Mark didn't grow up in the peninsula the way Eduardo did, he adds, "Florida."

A beat.

They speak at the same time.

"Mark, I --"

"Wardo, are --"

But the electricity goes right at that second, cables groaning with the effort, and the satellite at the top of the cell tower stills again. The static in his ear cuts out into nothing, swallowing up the rest of his words, the soft plea of, I need to see your face.

The call is lost.

-

He holds onto his Blackberry even though he has yet to find a single spot where he gets reception. At the end of the day, he turns it off, because he's losing the battery.

He can't imagine what he'll need it for, really: what are the chances that there's somebody out there who, at the exact moment Eduardo's phone is on and charged, has his number and is going to call him?

Yeah. Okay, so he and Mark beat the odds. Again.

He slips his hand into his pocket occasionally, closing his fingers over the familiar shape of his phone and running his thumb over the buttons, the same way he'd rub the ten-cent coin around his neck like a talisman, like it still somehow holds Mark's voice. If he lifts it up to his ear, there'd be no ringtones, he thinks, no buzz of a dying battery, just Mark's voice, cracking, Wardo, where are you?

The sheer amount of "what if"s this leaves him with is almost paralyzing.

What if Mark doesn't come? Eduardo has no idea where he is, so he has no way of going to Mark, but come on, honestly, what's the likelihood that Mark's going to brave the most zombie-infested country in the world just to come to a vague city location Eduardo gave him during a ten-second phone call?

(In Mark's defense, he did move himself and a fledgling company cross-country to California after a conversation with Sean Parker that roughly lasted the same amount of time, so. You can't really rule it out.)

What if Mark does come, and dies trying to get here? The highways are going to be hell, cities buckled and broken; everything's blockaded and shut down for a quarantine that isn't going to lift, because there's nobody left to lift it, and Eduardo can't imagine Mark had a Charlie tucked away somewhere in Palo Alto to teach him how to hotwire a car or shoot a gun. He probably survived this long by sheer dumb luck.

What if Mark does come, and does get here, and can't find Eduardo?

Or, what if Eduardo dies because he's standing out in the open, waffling over an impossible decision?

Shifting his shotgun into his elbow, he smacks his palms against both cheeks for good measure. "Okay, Wardo," he tells himself, and using Mark's old three syllables are too much work, I'm only going to bother pronouncing two of them nickname for him helps clears his head. "Focus here. You have things that need to get done, regardless of whether or not you have company."

If Mark's in California (he probably is, Eduardo realizes, remembering the article he didn't read on Google News at the beginning of the epidemic; Mark was in Palo Alto then, so barring any other daring perilous journeys or sudden evacuations, he's probably still there,) then it'll take him a week to drive across the United States. Longer, if he's smart enough to go around the big cities and cut through the lonely deserts and bayous of the deep south instead.

"Okay," says Eduardo, and, with a quiet mental apology, lets go of Isi's dream of heading back towards Miami.

He's going to have to find someplace to stay.

-

21st Century Theaters sits at a defensible point on the Palm Beach side of the bridge, about twenty minutes' walking distance away. If he climbs the facade -- an enormous, formerly-neon crown that juts up into the sky, superimposed by the curling "21st" of the movie theater's name -- then he has an excellent aerial view in 360º. In clear sunshine, he can see as far as the Lake Worth side, and even in darkness, the parking lot is sheer open space; any zombie crossing it would be easy pickings.

Legs settled and locked around the sign, Eduardo squints through the sight of his gun, marking the perimeter points. The shotgun blast leaves a half-dozen pigeons scattering into the sky, but the recoil kick does not dislodge Eduardo from his perch.

He allows himself a moment to sit back and say, "Oh, yeah, I'm good."

Inside the theater, there's a lobby for the ticket booth and the concession stand, and beyond that, fourteen screens; seven small, five that are decent-sized, and two large amphitheaters that Eduardo assumes were used to play the big blockbusters, and all of them make him nervous. They're too dark, and too roomy: they seem exactly like the kind of place a zombie would settle in to nest. There aren't any here now: he's pretty sure that, during his fit a few days ago, he annihilated a large portion of Lake Worth's zombie population, but that doesn't mean they'll stay away.

While he ponders this problem, he lights a fire underneath the popcorn stand and gets a kettle popping. Since the vats of hydrogenated vegetable oil that try to masquerade as American popcorn butter have gone grotesquely rancid, Eduardo goes into the back and finds a thing of caramelized sugar, and pours that over his popcorn instead, and finds himself with a whole cauldron full of kettle corn. It's the first sweet treat he's had since he left Charlie's.

Too impatient to wait for it to cool, he pops some in his mouth, hissing through the burn of it and chewing happily.

A beat later, inspiration strikes.

Wiping his stinging fingers off on his jeans, he grabs his shotgun and heads for the Employees Only door, elbowing it open. In the industrial labyrinth behind it, he finds the doors for each of the projection rooms for the screens. Locked, of course, but Eduardo's gotten so good with his lock picks by this point that they're almost laughable.

There's limited space in all them except for the two big amphitheaters: in them, they -- er, he -- could probably roll out a sleeping bag, and a stockpile of provisions. If this is going to become a permanent crashpad, he could even start collecting books, starting with a Floridian atlas.

The best part: it's only accessible via one narrow staircase set behind a locked door. There's no way they -- he! -- wouldn't be able to hear a zombie approach through that.

"Fuck yes," Eduardo announces to the room at large. "This deserves more popcorn."

-

On his eleventh day of being alone, Mark Zuckerberg crosses the Lake Worth bridge, sitting vainglorious behind the wheel of a Jeep.

There are any number of recent historical landmarks that Eduardo or any member of his generation are never going to forget; the Columbine shooting, for example, or 9/11, or the day the epidemic hit. But for Eduardo, this one is going to trump them all; ask him what the single most important moment of the zombie apocalypse was, and he'll tell you without hesitation: it's the moment he sees Mark alive and breathing, unwashed, unshaven, and absolutely resplendent under the Floridian sunshine.

PART THREE: Mark

Mark, because he's a complete fucker and Eduardo will never stop owing him, brings him the holy grail of gifts.

"Shit," is all he can manage to say at first, leaning in through the car door to inspect the number of boxes Mark has stacked behind the passenger seat. The foam in the headrests have been gnawed away, he notices; Eduardo presumes Mark didn't do that, because he doubts there's much nutritional value in foam. "Where did you get these?"

He picks up box after box of ammunition, checking them -- wrong caliber, wrong caliber, wrong make, wrong -- oh, hey, these won't fit his shotgun but they'll definitely chamber in his handgun. He pockets them, thrilling with delight; it feels a lot like gluttony, the realization that with this, he isn't going to have to ration his gunshots for awhile.

Bullets are more valuable than food, than clean water, than shelter, and Mark's brought him what Eduardo failed to find for himself.

He cranes his neck back, catching a glimpse of Mark through the window; he's scanning outwards, a nervous back-and-forth tick of his eyes, wary even though it's daylight. He glances towards Eduardo like the touch of his gaze is a physical thing, his mouth twisting sardonically in the corners.

"Wardo," he says, his voice raspy; either from weeks of silence, or, like Eduardo, complete overuse in a bid to fill the silence. "It took me three days to get through Texas, because I practically had to abscond to Mexico to avoid the unholy trifecta that is Austin, San Antonio, and Houston smack in the fucking middle of the state," he makes an ugly gesture with his hands, like he's trying to wipe Texas off a map in punishment for the inconvenience. "Seriously, walk into any farmhouse in the state and you'll set on those," he nods at the boxes of ammo.

Eduardo's heart does something strange and palpable inside his chest.

He doesn't know what's showing on his face, but whatever it is, it makes Mark's eyes go guarded. "What?" he says defensively.

Eduardo just shakes his head, unsure as to how to express it. Here's Mark, who survived the destruction of the Bay Area, who lost his entire social network, all his friends and family, same as Eduardo -- and yet he still pronounces Texas like an adolescent kid, like he's never been north of the Mason-Dixon line: stretched out and exaggerated, Tex-ASS.

He hasn't thought about kissing Mark since before he heard his voice from a thousand miles away, but the urge swells up out of nowhere, to swing the door to the Jeep closed and step up to him, put one hand on the back of his neck to keep him still, and kiss his mouth until it kissed him back.

He thinks of how hard Mark had held on to him -- it was the kind of hug that Eduardo can still feel, cement-pressed into his bones -- and it occurs to him that Mark might not push him away.

-

Using the theater as an epicenter, Eduardo had used his daylight hours to scout in circles, radiating outwards, and the same day he heard the roar of the Jeep's engine coming up the Lake Worth bridge, he found an all-Cuban grocery that had mostly remained unscathed by humanity's mass panic. The major supermarkets were completely ransacked by the crowds before Eduardo even got here, but despite the ominous, rank smell coming from the produce and the deli sections, there are still provisions for the basics on these shelves.

Two days after Mark's arrival, he takes them out to stock up on industrial-strength bottles of vitamin supplements, because lack of fresh dairy is one of the first things they're going to start feeling the effects of. Into their backpacks go the calcium, followed by fish oil and the whole spectrum of vitamins A through E. Eduardo catches Mark studying the back of a bottle of Vitamin D, his mouth quirked like he's going to make a crack about why you would even need Vitamin D supplements in Florida of all places, but he catches Eduardo's eye and says nothing.

Mark hasn't really spoken a word since the first night, but Eduardo isn't going to push.

Trauma has different effects on different people.

Eduardo goes crazy and shoots things -- Mark, apparently, just goes quiet.

Next they compare jams and jellies; it's going to have to be their main source for fruit, up until the wild oranges come into season again. With the jams come the crackers, and with the crackers comes the sudden explosion of three freshly-woken zombies out of the freezer section.

Eduardo's shotgun is still propped up against the shelves of potassium and magnesium, so he drops his jar of apricot preservatives and pulls the back-up handgun from the waistband of his jeans, clicking the safety off and leveling the first zombie with a perfect headshot.

An answering shot from Mark takes out the second one, and Eduardo looks over, startled: Mark holds his gun with the awkward, self-aware uncertainty of someone who had to learn how to shoot things the hard way, eyes half-mad with the disgust at unfamiliar brain matter splattered all over him, but when Eduardo looks at him, he looks back, like this is the first time he's seen Eduardo, too.

Which is why the third zombie surprises both of them, snatching Mark up and pinning him, gun trapped uselessly between their bodies.

Mark flails, arms straining with the effort of holding the monster away from his jugular, and there's nowhere to go. As soon as he realizes this, his eyes fill with a real kind of mortal fear.

For one highwire, suspended moment, like the holding note of a symphonic chorus, Eduardo thinks about putting a bullet between Mark's eyes.

He has a clear shot, he can do it -- kill him now, before the zombie bites into his flesh and infects his blood, turns him into one of them. It'd be a mercy, Eduardo knows that. Mark wouldn't thank him if he stood back and let him transform. He imagines it, easily, settling into the stance, breathing out the way Charlie taught him, aiming and sending Mark's brains splattering against the glass.

He hears Isi's voice. Are you with me?

I'd want you to kill me. Mark.

Yeah. How about not.

Unthinking, he drops the gun into the mess of apricot at his feet and rips the twine straight out of the unpacked box next to the noodles. Without breaking stride, he loops it around the zombie's throat and pulls, hard. It staggers back into his body, its flesh putrid, slipshod, giving way beneath Eduardo's touch as easily as if it's made of mushed peas.

The second he has room, Mark jams the barrel under its chin and blows its head to smithereens; Eduardo cranes his neck out of the way to avoid the worst of the splatter, and feels the lukewarm smear of it across his earlobe and the side of his throat.

"Thanks," gasps Mark; Eduardo can scarcely hear him over the roar in his own ears.

He looks at him, unintentionally catching him at a fragile moment -- Mark looks glassine, like one of those see-through jellyfish or a fresh-hatched tadpole, all watery limbs and deeply undefended innards. He trembles, all over, and Eduardo wonders what it would be like, if he could split his own sternum open and keep Mark safe inside, protected by his own ribs and beating heart. Eduardo would do it, would do it without thinking.

Right.

Right, okay, they're done. They don't need nutrients that badly.

-

Here's another thing filed away with the things that Eduardo isn't going to forget until the day he dies: the noise Mark makes when he slams him up against the wall, a hard, physical sound like he's summoned his bones back to earth, a rush of breath punched out between his teeth.

His hands scrabble at Eduardo for purchase. Eduardo needs him to hang on. Needs.

"I'm fine!" Mark's talking, he realizes distantly, saying something, responding to something that's slip-streaming out of Eduardo's mouth, he doesn't know. "Wardo, I'm good, I'm --"

Maybe.

Maybe if somebody had held a gun to Mark's head that night in the Palo Alto house, threatened his life the same way that zombie breathing so close had made terror shoot panicked sparks inside his skull, if someone had made Eduardo stop and realize just how fucking fragile it all was and how there's never really ever an excuse to not kiss someone when you have the chance, then maybe he would have done this sooner.

As it is, now will have to do, and (he can still see it, so clear in his imagination that the action itself feel as instinctive as pulling the trigger, like it's already part of his muscle memory,) Eduardo grabs Mark's face, hands hooking around his jaw, and reels him in for a wrecking kiss.

Another noise, starved-sounding, and Mark's hands are on him, hauling him in.

His mouth cracks wide in order to suck down Eduardo's tongue, and Eduardo moans, falling into him like he'd been struck across the back of the knees. Their feet tangle in a desperate attempt to support them, and Eduardo catches them against the wall. They are touching everywhere, their knees, thighs, hips, stomachs, their hands to each other's faces and their mouths, their desperate mouths.

When Mark tries to break away, mouth moving in the direction of his neck, Eduardo snatches up a fistful his his shirt and yanks him back so hard his head rebounds off the wall. There's still bits of exploded zombie on him; Eduardo doesn't want to test this virus's tenacity upon being ingested via enthusiastic hickey.

That would be an incredibly sucky way to die.

"I'm okay," Mark says again, touching his wrists. Gentle, almost, the fucker, like Eduardo was the one who almost died. Fuck him, fucking fuck fuckerberg with the fucking.

Eduardo grabs onto his hair, yanks his head back so he can fasten his mouth to the (clean, relatively speaking,) skin at his throat. Mark whimpers. His pulse pounds against Eduardo's mouth; Eduardo sucks in time to it.

Nails bite into his shoulders, scrape down his back. The touch of Mark's fingertips to his hips have him shifting into the touch automatically.

"I'm okay, I'm not going anywhere," Mark continues, and fuck him, that's exactly what he almost did!

"Shut up," he snaps, and even pinned to the wall with his thighs locked in between Eduardo's legs, Mark still manages to shoot him a yeah, right, like that's going to happen look. "Mark --"

Fucker.

Eduardo came to this country to find his family, and now he has Mark, and that's going to have to be close enough, and fuck it if he's not going to do every-fucking-thing he can to keep it that way, and Mark Zuckerberg is not allowed to die, he isn't, he isn't.

"-- don't," manages to break through the static in his head. Mark's talking again. "Don't you go anywhere, either, fuck --" and his voice cracks right down the middle with need.

He turns his head to kiss him, open-mouthed and wanting to taste what that feels like, to have Mark need him as much as he needs Mark.

Why did you do it? Eduardo thinks at him, furious and terrified and so fucking in love he didn't stand a chance. Why did you risk everything to drive across the country to me? You could never even be bothered to show up on time when I asked you to, so why this?

Unbidden, he hears Charlie's voice, quiet in his memory.

If the people you love don't come to you, then you must go to them.

His eyes fly open. Mark looks back. His irises are blue-grey, pupils blown so wide they're only a thin rim of color, and when Eduardo puts the flat of his palm against his belly button, sliding it downwards, his eyes lid and his throat bobs.

-

They're warier every time they go scouting through stores after that.

By mutual, if not vocal, agreement, the bookstore becomes their favorite place to venture during their outings. They keep nocturnal hours, huddled up in the hot, claustrophobic space of the projection room, and sleep in shifts during the day; Eduardo sleeps from sunrise to noon, Mark sleeps during the afternoon.

Eduardo, arguably, gets the most sleep, but whenever he tries to swap, Mark just gives him this look like he couldn't imagine sleeping even if they had all the time in the world.

At the high point of noon, Mark wakes Eduardo up by slipping cold fingers into his sleeping bag to hook around his ankle.

Eduardo comes awake instantly, his eyes catching on Mark's face -- the wispy facial hair that might, in another life, have been a beard or a mustache -- and he groans in protest, levering his foot against Mark's hip to push him away.

"You need to shave that off," he complains.

Mark's mouth makes a funny almost-smile. "Don't knock it until you try it," he answers, and then, "oh, wait, look, you've got a horrific mess of your own," and pats at Eduardo's cheeks. It's true: at this rate, Eduardo could probably apply for one of those Geico caveman commercials.

So the next time they make a supply run, Mark grabs the last Venus razor off the shelf and a thing of moisturizing cream and shaves it off right there in the aisle, foam dripping everywhere.

"Hey, whatever!" he goes, catching Eduardo's look, and Eduardo lifts his hands, because he hadn't said a word. "There's no one left alive to judge me, anyway. So, here, want it? Lady shavers actually are smoother."

"I'm ... not going to ask how you know that."

Mark's mouth curves, but his eyes go sad and shuttered away. He clams up like this, whenever Eduardo brushes too close to a memory of a time before the apocalypse.

It's not like he really has room to talk: tentatively, Mark had brought up Miami one night, and Eduardo had wanted to talk about it as much as he wanted to pull his teeth out of his gums.

He still doesn't know how to handle that grief. He doesn't want to witness Mark's fumbling attempt with it, either.

Eduardo had actually scoped out the two closest bookstores during the time Mark took to drive across the country: obstinately, he'd gone in with the romantic idea that he was going to use the end of the world to catch up on all the reading he never got done while he was working ten-hour days, wallow in some nostalgia as the protagonists wrestle with every-day demons that Eduardo now can only about, but in actuality, he spends most of his trips in the how-to section, because being separated from Wiki How is like missing a limb, and there's still a lot of shit Eduardo doesn't know how to do.

"I'm thinking we should rig together some kind of pulse charge, or at least a simple kind of bomb," he's telling Mark on one of these days, stepping down the glass-scattered sidewalk. There's rain coming; the clouds tell him so. "Explosions are a fantastic way of ensuring that a downed zombie stays down, but weirdly enough, they don't publish manuals on How to Blow Up Things That Were Formerly People."

Mark makes a noise in the back of his throat, and beelines straight down one of the aisles as soon as they're inside. About thirty seconds later, he returns with a water-stained copy of Fight Club.

Eduardo feels the flush of gratitude go down to his toes. "That works," he says.

-

When Mark finally does tell Eduardo everything, it literally is everything at once.

He'd left Mark sleeping as the sun set, climbing up onto the roof of the theater to do a perimeter sweep. Things had been more or less quiet since the encounter in the Cuban grocery; they were still picking off zombies like they were going to win a state fair prize for it, but they'd been lonely stragglers, easy shots, and they'd taken up Isibel's practice of tallying their kills. Squinting into the setting sun, Eduardo scans the surroundings in quadrants -- clear, clear, clear, and --

No.

There, on the bridge. There's at least a dozen of them, ambling around each other and checking the abandoned vehicles like kids hunting through their parents' pockets for sweets. They're too far away for Eduardo to shoot from here, especially not while aiming into the setting tropical sun.

There's no other choice -- they're going to have to hide and hope the zombies move north or south during the night without exploring the area too closely.

He slips from the roof, careful of where he casts a shadow, and steals through the empty theater, hurriedly picking up all signs of inhabitation, anything that might indicate fresh, unturned meat.

Since they're made of nothing but cartilage, noses are one of the first things on the undead to rot, so he doesn't think they have a very acute sense of smell, if any, but that doesn't mean they don't have some scary keen sense for tracking down living humans. He wonders if his pounding heart is leaving some sort of signature in the air. It's an incredibly frightening thing to think.

His anxiety keeps them both on edge all night.

Sitting cross-legged in their sleeping bags, they manage to piece together a plan to, if that pack of zombies still wandering around tomorrow, lure them into a trap and blow them to pieces with help from Tyler Durden, but they can't do much besides go over the plan again and again while locked up in the projection room.

Finally, Mark gets fed up with Eduardo's obsessive pacing and furtive checking of the locks ("you're making too much noise, genius!" he hisses out between his teeth, and Eduardo sits down again, because he has a point,) and zips their sleeping bags together, curling into it. It's pitch-black, and Eduardo listens to the sound of Mark shifting around in the vinyl, trying to get comfortable.

After his comment about noise, it seems unnecessarily loud, and, annoyed, Eduardo goes down onto his hands and knees. He climbs into the nest of sleeping bags, wrapping Mark up just to keep him still.

Mark settles into him, easy, stretching his legs out so that their ankles slip against each other. They both smell as rank as gym socks, but Eduardo's mostly gotten used to it by now.

Unbidden, he remembers what it was like to have his hand down Mark's pants, the way Mark's fingers clutched at him like a cliff's edge.

Close to sunrise, Mark starts talking; the words come pouring out of him, a pauseless, airless slipstream that stirs memories in him of standing there and hearing if one domino goes, the other dominoes go. Wardo.

In a voice so quiet it's barely there, he gives Eduardo a chronology of the events that unspooled in California -- everything Eduardo himself had been scared to ask after. The way he tells it, it sounds like he's been ordering and organizing this entire story for weeks, just waiting for a chance to tell somebody.

Eduardo stays still, and stays quiet, keeping his eyes fixed on the uneven tail of hair at the nape of Mark's neck, the souvenir from a mishap with a pair of hair clippers at some point in his past, before he crossed the country to get back into Eduardo's life.

He doesn't say anything, just lets himself become a reservoir for Mark to pour his words into, like it was the only thing he was made to do.

Mark talks about the panic room he had in his house in Palo Alto, the sterile-lit white room he holed out in for weeks and weeks and weeks, before hunger for something other than freeze-dried beef jerky and the world's worst case of cabin fever drove him out into the changed world. He tells him about the first time he killed a zombie ("I threw up everywhere, like, immediately after," he says, and Eduardo makes a mental note to tell him sometime about the fainting,) and he tells him about searching his neighborhoods for any sign of life.

You were alone, Eduardo thinks, and closes his eyes against the pain of that thought: he didn't even last three days of being on his own. Mark shivers at the brush of Eduardo's eyelashes against the top of his spine. Before I called you. You were completely alone.

For months.

Mark's story continues onto the road trip; how he bundled into that Jeep and plotted himself a course across the deep American south, with only the thinnest hope that Eduardo would be alive when he reached the other end.

"I drove during the day and slept at night," he murmurs. "Weighing the need for visibility while I was driving versus being defenseless at the time of night when zombies were most active. I got really familiar with sleeping with my gun." He tilts his head, musing. "I poured water over the engines to cool them, too. Just in case zombies could, like, sense heat or something. I don't know, I didn't know much about zombies then -- I'd locked myself away before there was even much concrete theory on their behavior. So. Yeah, I had to learn as I went," he adds as an afterthought, like mastering zombie survival wasn't any different than teaching himself to play the oboe. Of course he can do it, Wardo, he's Mark Zuckerberg.

"I thought ... I thought maybe they'd pass me up if I looked as dead as everybody else. I don't know. It took me eight days -- and that whole time, I didn't see a single other living soul."

The silence after that stretches for a very, very long time.

Finally, Eduardo wets his lips and speaks up.

"We -- I mean. I think it's the light that attracts them most during the night," he says, because the first time Mark flicked on a flashlight in the darkened theater, Eduardo'd knocked it from his hands faster than the striking bite of a snake. Just earlier this evening, he'd shaken Mark awake and enlisted his help in blacking out the projection room windows -- he doesn't think the zombies are going to come in for a late-night showing of The Fast and the Furious, but he doesn't want to give them a single excuse to investigate.

They follow the light: he and Isi had made a game out of it once, from the top of an enormous four-story house. They shined their flashlights down at the ground and watched the zombies stumble after it like cats chasing a penlight, straying easily within shooting range.

"Think, like," he says. "Jeff Goldblum from Jurassic Park, with the flare. The T-Rex originally was attracted to the flare, right, but because Jeff Goldblum's character kept running, the T-Rex followed him instead."

"Oh, good, a movie reference," Mark deadpans. "I think in nothing but movie references these days."

"Body heat is another theory," Eduardo continues. He's been thinking about that fear he had earlier, about leaving some kind of stench of fear on the air. It makes sense. There's nothing quite like the warmth of somebody's skin, after all, so he supposes it's only natural that you'd still want it, even necrotic and rotting, all your sentience gone except for the functions necessary to staggering around, following that electric spark of somebody else's neural synapses.

"If that's the case," Mark allows. "There's nothing we can do about it. They'll always be following us."

Eduardo slips a hand underneath Mark's shirt, palm spreading flat on his stomach. There's no intent behind it, just thought: there's nothing, he thinks, that will ever be as warm as Mark's stomach, that single spot right over his solar plexus.

How badly do you think he'll want this, if he's the one that turns first?

-

"I was so scared, Wardo," comes out of Mark like a confession, like it'd been twisted and pulled out of him.

He thinks about returning the gesture -- telling him about Lin Yao and his girlfriend from Alabama, about Magnolia and his first spectacular failure at zombie-killing, about Charlie, the way he said, you were the only one who came to see if she was okay, about Isi and her son with the missing teeth who was going to start first grade, and the way her dead body had ragdolled when he picked her up, her neck creaking alarmingly until he supported it, no elasticity in her muscles left.

He doesn't. Instead, he nuzzles into the back of Mark's neck, brushing his lips against the warm, human skin there, and tells him to go to sleep.

They need the rest.

-

Eduardo flew around the globe to find his family, and he did, and Mark drove across the country to find him, and he did, but that doesn't really mean either of them know what to do about it.

Eduardo cannot lose Mark. This he knows. Cannot. Simply cannot. It's already happened once -- Eduardo letting another person become the center of his universe, and then she died, and he doesn't think he can go through that kind of grief again, that sinkhole of gravity inside his chest.

So he's careful. He's so fucking careful, and for him, being careful translates to doing nothing at all. He'd rather do nothing than run the risk of driving Mark off, or getting him killed.

He doesn't ask about Dustin.

He doesn't ask about Chris, or Chris's boyfriend, or Tanya the current CFO of Facebook, or Mark's sisters, or any of them, and Mark doesn't volunteer the information.

Those stories all kind of become the one and the same, in the end.

So instead, they sleep in their own eclectic patterns and stay up all night, thoroughly exhausted and listening to the sounds of zombies ransacking their side of the city in search of food. They keep on catching each other's eyes; in the darkness, they make for eerie gleams, flickering in and out every time they blink. Mostly, though, they just exist in their own worlds, within the same proximity.

At noon each day, the sun is at its highest point, driving the zombies deep into into their nests. Usually they're groggily napping around that time and switching shifts, but not always, because high noon is the safest time to be out and about. Sunset and sunrise is the worst, that needle's point edge where the zombies are moving and so are they. They need to run for supplies more often now than Eduardo ever did on his own, because there's two of them to feed and shelter and keep healthy.

In one of those sad twists of fate, Mark sunburns pretty spectacularly during each of these outings; the most dangerous time to be out in the sun in this side of the globe is from eleven to two, although it stretches a little longer in both directions during the summer.

He picks at them as they peel, coming away with flecks of dead skin which he rolls into little balls between his fingers and flicks away, frequently in the direction of Eduardo's sleeping bag.

He makes a face, and his voice cracks with disuse. "Do you have to do that?"

Mark blinks, slowly, and takes a moment to make the correlation between his action and Eduardo's reaction. Then he scoffs, scooting across the floor in a crab-walk. Reaching out, he does the inexplicable and pushes his hand into Eduardo's hair, carding his fingers through it. Eduardo cants up, an involuntary response to the pressure of Mark's nails on his scalp, unevenly torn as they are.

Mark pulls away, showing Eduardo the ends of his fingers. Dandruff covers the pads at his fingertips.

"We're so unwashed I don't think a little more dead skin is going to hurt us," he says dryly.

On a whim, Eduardo pulls out their Floridian atlas, the one Mark brought, while Mark is busy warming up something that will attempt to be edible in the employee's room microwave, during another one of the stints where the electricity comes back on. He drags his finger along a topographical map, finds a fitness center at the bottom of an incline, which might still have legitimate water pressure thanks to gravitational forces. He thinks about a hot shower, and then he thinks about Mark, wet and naked under the spray, thinks about putting his mouth on his skin and tasting clean water, thinks about Mark's fingers in his hair again.

"Right," he goes, and puts the atlas back on the shelf. He picks up his shotgun and goes to find Mark.

-

He rocks back onto his haunches, ducking his head down in order to spit between his legs, letting the water rush away with it down the drain. He still swallows some on accident, and grimaces as the taste settles into his mouth.

It prompts him into asking, musingly, "Do you think semen is kosher?"

Mark's laughter bursts out of him at that, unbidden and honest and ringingly loud. His knees give out seemingly against his will, and Eduardo presses himself back against the water-warmed tile of the shower cubicle in order to make room, letting him collapse down like a deck of cards. There still isn't any space; their wet legs scissor around each other, forming a cradle hold.

"That's probably something you can find in the Tanakh, if you wanted to go look," Mark murmurs. The flush of orgasm stains the high bones of his cheeks and tracks a red pattern down his chest. His fingers traipse along the knobs in Eduardo's knees, like he can't help but touch.

Eduardo wants to lick him.

Just. Because.

The shower beats down on the tops of their heads, and Mark lifts a hand, tracing the tip of his finger along the chain at Eduardo's neck. He presses down on the ten-cent coin, hard enough to leave an imprint in Eduardo's flesh. The way he rubs back and forth across the seahorse makes Eduardo think he knows there's a story there, but he's decent enough not to ask.

Their foreheads brush, and Eduardo nuzzles against the bridge of his nose, breathing out.

They're touching everywhere, and the water swirls away down the drain.

-

"I knew I should have brought toothpaste," Eduardo bitches later, when they finally pull themselves out from under the water. He bares his teeth at himself in the mirror, eyeing the yellowed ridges of scuzz built up around his gums. "My teeth are gross and I have dick breath, and it's kind of your fault."

Mark snorts. "I'm not the one who wanted to fuck in the shower," he reminds him, dry as bone, and then wanders off, leaving Eduardo to try and scrape some off with his fingernails.

Him not being directly in his line of sight makes Eduardo antsy like he's unarmed, which probably isn't healthy in a psychological way, but whatever, everyone he's ever known is dead, he's entitled to a little separation anxiety.

In a decision between grabbing for his boxers or grabbing for his shotgun, Eduardo goes for the gun. He needn't have worried, though; Mark's just in the next room over, not getting chewed on by zombies or sticking his finger in a light socket or in any danger whatsoever. He's still naked, standing amidst a row of lockers, back to the door with his shoulders hunched up. Eduardo takes a moment to study the architecture of his spine, before stepping up behind him.

"Hey," he goes, and Mark lifts his head with a distracted noise. In one hand, he has a roll of measuring tape, and in the other ...

Eduardo gets a look at what he's doing and stops short, amused.

It has to be written all over his face, what he's thinking, because the look Mark gives him is unrepentant. "What?" he goes, on the defense. "I've never done it before."

"Mark. Mark, that's ... that's like a girl not knowing her cup size." Eduardo boggles a little bit -- to think, he's still learning new things about Mark Zuckerberg, the hyped-up, over-publicized CEO of Facebook, even now. "You've never measured your own dick before?"

"Obviously not, Wardo, keep up."

"I'm finding this to ... What else were you doing during those lawsuits, then?"

"Oh, ha ha," Mark goes, without heat.

Eduardo waits until he puts the measuring tape back where he found it before he goes, "Well? What's the verdict?"

Mark cuts him a look at that, eyes raking him from head to toe in a slow drag. "Don't worry," he goes, pushing himself off the lockers and approaching Eduardo, who goes hot all over. There's intent in the way Mark's looking at him, and he shifts his stance, bracing his feet the way he does when he's anticipating the recoil from a shotgun blast. Mark's tongue darts out, licking at his bottom lip; it's basically like being shot.

"I'm a grower," he confides, low, and when Eduardo grabs for him, unable to go a beat more without touching him and hissing out a soft come here, you fucker, he puts a hand to his shoulder, digging his knuckles into the bruise he sucked into Eduardo's skin.

-

Unlike Isi, Mark doesn't talk about finding any other survivors.

Eduardo knows there has to be other people left alive, because they can't be the only ones resourceful and lucky enough to have avoided getting sick or bitten or brutally murdered or otherwise turned into a flopping, drooling mess of necrotic flesh, but Mark just doesn't seem to care if there's anyone else alive on the planet, or if he and Eduardo really are the last two living remnants of Homo sapiens, game over, thanks for playing.

It's ... it's the way he touches Eduardo sometimes, like he's found all he was ever going to find.

Eduardo can't even pretend he knows how to handle that.

So, for the most part, he doesn't.

-

Mark, it turns out, is conversationally competent in at least five languages, and seems to take the end of the world as his excuse to learn them all -- he takes to collecting Rosetta Stone on cassette tapes the same way other people would collect movie ticket stubs or glass unicorn figurines.

Every time they hit up the bookstore, looking for information on how to fix whatever else has gone wrong with their hideaway this time, or how to wreak destruction down on the heads of the undead, Mark always comes away with one tiny phrase-book or two tucked into the kangaroo pouch of his sweatshirt, which he pages through idly during the long, sleepless, claustrophobic hours of the night, shoulders pressed up against the jutting corners of the projection machine and his lips moving soundlessly over foreign syllables. Eduardo watches him put headphones on over his ears, hands cradling the cassette player like it's an ostrich egg, eyes closed through his conversations with long-dead partners.

Eventually, he has to ask. "What's the point?"

Mark casts an absent look in his direction, turning the cassette over to side B. "Hmm?"

"Of --" he gestures; the Rosetta Stone box is broken open, smiling front facing him. Today, Mark is working on his Finnish. "What are the odds that you're going to meet a native Finn wandering around Palm Beach?"

"Oh." Mark considers it, and then shrugs in that way he does. "Someone ought to, I guess. Be kind of ..." he slants his eyes, thoughtful. "Kind of like a museum. As long as I'm alive and speaking, the culture doesn't go extinct. So much of culture is language, Wardo."

It's one of the more surprising things Mark's ever said to him. At Harvard, he knew Mark had tested out of his foreign language requirement by acing the Spanish and French proficiency test (he only needed to take one, but he took both, because he's Mark and that's how he operates,) but since then, Mark's picked up two new languages, and then learns two more here, bringing his total proficiency to: English, Spanish, French, Mandarin, Portuguese (Eduardo's eyebrows hike up at that one, but Mark gives no apology or explanation, and for a couple days after this revelation, they move seamlessly and gleefully between it and English, and it's only then that Eduardo really figures out what Mark meant -- he hadn't realized how homesick he was for his native tongue after all the silence until he hears it in Mark's mouth -- but at the same time, however, it reminds him almost eerily of Isibel, and he steers them back into exclusively speaking in English; if Mark notices, he doesn't ask,) Catalan, and Arabic. And now he's working on Finnish.

"Okay," says Eduardo, and scoots closer. "Practice on me."

Mark's hands still on the cassette player. "Do you want to learn something?"

"Mandarin," says Eduardo immediately. He doesn't have Mark's easy ability to pick up new languages: it's like his brain got stuck after the age of five. He's picked up some polite phrases, of course, because it's difficult to live in Singapore and not learn at least basic Chinese. Christy taught him some, too, in semi-nervous preparation for meeting her parents. They broke up before that happened, but he did meet her grandmother once. She was at least two heads shorter than Eduardo was, and had to stretch up in order to pat his face in a friendly way. She kept repeating something, smiling benignly and patting him some more, and it got stuck in his head the way song lyrics would. He never did remember to ask Christy what she said.

He tries it out on Mark once, just to see, as they stand side-by-side, swirling the cold rainwater in a bucket for their weekly shave.

It takes him a moment to sort out the unexpected shift in language, and then Mark double-takes, his whole face collapsing in surprise. When he sees the earnestness in Eduardo's expression, he cracks up.

"What?" Eduardo goes, suspicious. "Wait, wait. No, crap, what did I say?"

"You --" Mark looks at him again, and breaks into fresh sniggers, his shoulders shaking with the force of it. "You -- oh my god, you just told me my kids would look like monkey piss."

"What -- oh my god, are you serious?" And then they're both laughing, holding onto the edges of the table in order to stay upright, because all these years, Eduardo had thought Christy's grandmother was just extending some conversational pleasantry, and the whole time, she was cheerfully maligning his and Christy's hypothetical mixed-race children, and Eduardo had just smiled and nodded his way through it.

"I -- I," Mark wheezes. "I really hope you never actually used that on anyone before, thinking it was a compliment!"

"Me too!" Eduardo manages to get out, and it sets them off again.

-

Before the zombie apocalypse, before Singapore, before even the whole ugly mess with Facebook and the lawsuit, once or twice or maybe even a few more times than that, he'd imagined what it would be like to grow old with Mark.

Not in a gay way. Not then, at least, because queer identity hadn't even really been in Eduardo's vocabulary until Chris put it there, their senior year at Harvard, and really got him thinking about where he fit within the sphere of being different, something which hadn't even occurred to him that he could do, and by that point it was too late to think of Mark in anything but a distant, poisonous, bitter kind of way.

But just, like, he'd thought about growing old with him, the same way everybody kind of carelessly imagines growing old with their best friends. Uncomplicated. Happy.

And now, now that it's a reality -- he is literally going to spend the rest of his life with Mark Zuckerberg, it scares him, scares him the same way it scares him when Mark touches him like he'd trekked across the ravaged country just so he could put his hands on Eduardo, and there's a part of Eduardo that simply doesn't want to come to terms with that.

So he starts picking fights.

It's over the stupid stuff, even, the stuff that doesn't even fucking matter except for the weeks, the months, the thick, vicious years he spent desperate to say them -- they fight about Facebook, about what they did wrong; long, cyclical fights that turn their throats raw every time their volume climbs. It feels a lot like they've been holding back since Mark got here; in the dark silence between them, this is what lurked.

You cut me out!

And --

You froze the accounts!

And --

But you signed the settlement.

Around and around they go, and it isn't until Eduardo finds himself hurtling Singapore against Mark like it's a hammer meant to smash him and not the best damn thing that happened to him, outside of "it's like a final club, except we're the president, Wardo," (and then I moved to Singapore, do you know what that's like?) that he thinks maybe he's hit rock bottom, empty-stomached and in pain, because you're never supposed to let something you love get turned into a weapon to hurt somebody else, but here Mark is, shoulders up around his ears and his face set, hard, like it's been glued back together out of a dozen pieces, and here's Eduardo, trying to break him apart again.

Why are you doing this? Eduardo asks himself, but he already knows the answer.

He doesn't trust Mark as far as he can spit, not with his company or his memories or his feelings, and that's scary when you know now that you're never going to leave him.

If Mark left right now, just started walking that line right back across the American south, then Eduardo would pick up his shotgun and follow; it wouldn't matter that Mark told him the Phoenix Club only wanted a token diversity pledge, it wouldn't matter that Mark forgot him on the tarmac at SFO, wouldn't matter that he signed the settlement to make him go away. All of that is horrible, and Eduardo will never forget Mark Zuckerberg's amazing capacity to injure him in every way, but it wouldn't be enough to make Eduardo live without him.

And.

The thing is.

Mark has never played by anyone's rules. He keeps on making these half-joking, half self-deprecating remarks that he's the exact opposite of whatever type of person you'd expect to survive the zombie apocalypse, but that's exactly why he survives when everybody else is gone. He has never once done what anybody has expected him to do.

He's a different kind of survivalist, the cockroach kind, and Eduardo trusts him in case of zombies.

Eduardo doesn't trust Mark with a lot of things, but he trusts him with his life, no question.

-

Mark, of course, completely upends the status quo: he kisses Eduardo first.

-

"You know what would be cool?" goes Eduardo, stretching out his legs so that his joints pop and his muscles yawn, contented. He's on his back on the theater roof, gravel digging into his shoulder blades, watching the clouds scuttle across the sky. He can tell the wind direction, easy as anything, but he's out of practice and he's going to need a calculator if he wants to determine the speed.

It'll be sunset soon, and they'll need to load their guns and hide away, but there's some time yet.

"If," he continues. "They made a movie about us. Later, you know, all I Am Legend and shit." He props himself up on his elbow, pulling a thoughtful face. "Will Smith could totally play me, don't you think? He's badass enough."

"Right, because we're so glamorous right now," Mark answers, dripping sarcasm. "Everybody will fall all over themselves making a movie out of this," he pulls his shirt away from his skin and makes a grossed-out face; the armpits are yellowed out, and there's a stain on the front from where Eduardo sort-of not-really accidentally jerked off on him.

He smirks. "Are you telling me you wouldn't just love to have a movie made about your life?"

They're both ignoring the fact that there isn't anybody left to make movies, not about anything.

"God, no," says Mark immediately. "I can't imagine anything worse."

Eduardo tilts his head, questioning.

"They'd get it wrong," Mark says, soft, and touches his thumb to Eduardo's bottom lip, like it's the bravest thing he can imagine doing.

-

The first couple of times, Mark is horrifically shaky right after sex. They're full-on anxious tremors, running all through his frame as he puts himself back together; his hands fumble trying to do up his clothes, his eyes twitch nervously, flicking from Eduardo to away and then back again. It's like his whole world has shaken apart under the pressure of Eduardo's hands on him.

Those first few times becomes several times.

Several times becomes a pattern.

Summer becomes fall without much discernible change in the weather; storms come in off the Gulf and meets the cold front brewing over the Atlantic.

Singapore is only about a stone's throw away from the Equator, so it's been years since he's has to worry about anything like the days getting shorter -- the change of the seasons isn't as bad as it would have been if they'd tried to eke it out somewhere up north, but the nights here will get longer, and with it, the zombies are going to be out later and later. They're going to need to act -- sooner, rather than later.

Eduardo knows he's digging his heels in. He can't help it. Mark is the most settled Eduardo has ever seen him, and he doesn't want to do anything that might change that.

He has no idea what to do, but at this point, he's kind of used to the sensation. He doubts he'll ever know what he's doing.

There's no precedent for something like this, after all. No case study, no projection forecast, no omen cropping up in a deck of tarot cards, nothing that tells him what to expect, now that he's the man whose whole entire world can be found in the cartography of Mark Zuckerberg's body; the bend in his neck, the soft movement of his ribs as he naps trustingly up against Eduardo's legs, the way his eyes change color when he looks at Eduardo, going the blue-grey color of a sunrise sky.

On the roof, he rolls over and pins Mark back into the gravel. His hands go instantly to cradle Eduardo's face, thumbing his cheekbones and pulling him in for a kiss, like it's as necessary as breathing.

It's the kind of thing that can move continents, Eduardo thinks.

Afterwards, he pitches American quarters off the side of the building, sunset blazing full and bright on the horizon. Mark doesn't shake at all when he takes his gun in a two-handed grip and shoots each one of them clear out of the sky.

-

They pick their way back to shore, the waves pulling at their calves and their fingers still dangling in the space between their bodies, tangled like a promise. With the other hand, Mark lifts his fingers to his cheek, absently touching the spot where Eduardo kissed him as easily as if they had been married for years.

It's the memory of Singapore that gave him the idea, actually. It had taken him months to sort out the names of all the hundreds of Indonesian islands that border their country to the south, scattered like buckshot into the Indian Ocean. He remembers Isibel telling him about her plan to set up a refuge in the Everglades, on some island where the zombies will be afraid to come.

The rest of Florida has places like that too, he knows, out in the Gulf and in Key West; islands set up as nature preserves, where the sea turtles will come to lay their eggs as they have for centuries, heedless of the zombies.

Some of them, if Mark and Eduardo can get to them, will be uninhabited.

Where there were no inhabitants, there will be no zombies.

Mark breaks the silence.

"Before," he says, and gestures around, meaning before I drove cross-country to get to you, before you flew here to get to me, before the zombies, back when we were billionaires and enemies and ex-friends. "If I had called, would you have come?"

"No," says Eduardo, who doesn't even have to think about it.

He rubs his thumb over the Singapore ten-cent coin, back and forth.

Mark nods like he understands, and he probably does -- he talks about California the same way Eduardo talks about Singapore, like he's never been as happy anywhere else. They missed each other, of course they did, and they'll openly admit as such, but neither one of them would have come for the other, without this impetus.

Zombies. It was the end of the world at the hands of zombies that brought Mark Zuckerberg and Eduardo Saverin back together again.

Go figure.

-

It's been five months since Ground Zero climbed into the back of a New York taxi cab, sneezed, said excuse me, and started the apocalypse.

It's been four months, one week since the first zombie sat bolt upright on an autopsy table and went for the jugular of the coroner, ravenous and deranged.

It's been four months since America declared a state of emergency and went into quarantine.

It's been three months since Eduardo learned how to shoot people in the face.

It's been two months since he got the last flight out of Singapore, since he cradled his dead cousin's skull in his hands and said good-bye, since he made a phone call and Mark answered.

It's been one month, three weeks since he met Mark on the Lake Worth bridge and knew he was never going to be alone again, not if he could help it.

And today is today.

"I found a boat," says Eduardo.

Mark looks up from his book; his hair is curling, messy with humidity, and he needs to shave again. But he smiles, and comes down the steps to meet him.

-

fin