Chapter Text
Maya has never been a morning person.
God save her, but the entire act of waking up for her is typically a two-hour process on the best of days. Which is fine, of course, when appropriately scheduled and accounted for. Half a dozen alarms and a pantry well stocked with four different kinds of coffee and she was golden.
It is a much larger issue when, upon blinking her eyes open amidst a sharp ache at the front of her skull, she finds herself face to face with a corpse.
A corpse.
One that is actively trying to drag itself closer and snapping its jaws like it wants to bite her.
Maya is not proud of the scream that rips itself out of her but, well, in her defence: corpse.
She rolls away, half panicked movement and half still asleep. The dead guy is groaning, which should not be possible given he’s missing both legs and the entire front of his neck. She can see his fucking spine oh god –
Maya blinks, hard, hoping against hope that she’ll open her eyes and be back in bed – where she should be – and not wherever the hell she is right now with the actual real-life zombie steadily making its way towards her.
Jesus.
She takes a sharp breath.
Zombie, focus.
Her eyes dart around the room. She’s alone, aside from the zombie, in what appears to be an office break room. Nothing but tables, chairs, a shitty water cooler and a blessedly closed door.
The zombie is still crawling towards her as she scrambles to her feet.
Maya doesn’t bother trying to look for a knife. She probably wouldn’t find one, and she doesn’t want to get that close to the damn thing anyway. Instead, she grabs the nearest chair. It’s wooden, thank God, and terribly made, even better.
She doesn’t hesitate when she brings the whole thing down on the zombie’s head.
It splinters and falls apart on impact.
She grabs a leg and stabs it through the still groaning skull with as much force as she can muster.
The room is finally silent.
Maya blinks again.
She’s covered in blood.
Zombie blood.
It had splattered all over her when she bludgeoned the dead guy. That was… not good. Was the blood contagious? She knows a zombie bite is fatal, but that was just in stories, diseases could travel in way more avenues in real life.
Whatever the case, even normal human blood could probably get her sick, so the best thing to do was wash it all off.
Just in case.
Mind made up, Maya tucked the fact that she’d just killed a man into a little corner of her mind, resolved to have a panic attack about it later, and made to look for a bathroom.
She grabbed her chair leg, which was relatively sturdy compared to, well, the rest of the chair, and creeped towards the door. This was about the moment she became aware of the fact that she was wearing heels.
Which… what?
Maya didn’t even know what to do with that. Her head hurt, she was in some random office building, zombies were real, and someone had put her in heels. She definitely had amnesia or something because for the life of her she could not figure out how she’d gotten here to begin with.
Whatever, wash the blood off first, everything else… after.
She quieted her breathing as she neared the door, reaching out and turning the nob as slowly as she could.
She stuck the chair leg out, waving it about a few times. When nothing tried to eat it, she smacked it against the wall.
A loud thud rang out through the halls.
She held her breath.
Nothing. Thank God.
She crept out of the break room, still silently, refusing to let her guard down. It was bloody eerie out here. There was no one else, not even a dead body, moving or otherwise. The cubicles were in disarray, chairs and papers and stationery thrown this way and that, blood stains dragged across the walls. Half the lights were busted, one appeared to have been broken via bullet hole.
A glance up showed a bathroom sign still illuminated and flickering.
Great.
Maya booked it to the bathroom, which, thankfully, was a single room with a nice lockable door.
The second the lock clicked shut Maya threw her back against the door and closed her eyes, breathing deeply through her mouth and unsuccessfully pretended she wasn’t hyperventilating.
Opening her eyes did not improve this situation.
Because there, standing in the bathroom mirror and staring at her with wide eyes…
Was a stranger.
-
Maya liked to think she was a reasonable person.
But, given the situation, she felt perfectly entitled to the absolute breakdown she was currently having.
Because what the fuck?
What the fuck?
Zombies was one thing. Amnesia a whole other issue.
But this? This?
She couldn’t have hit her head hard enough to hallucinate an entire other body. Oh God, had she body-snatched some poor girl? Was that even possible? Oh, who was she kidding? There were zombies, what’s a little body snatching after that?
Maya laughed, a little hysterically.
She touched her face, the girl in the mirror did the same.
It was impossible. It was happening. What the fuck?
She had brown eyes, that hadn’t changed much, but they were much darker than her own had been. Her hair, which she’d been dying blonde for near on a decade now, was pitch black. Still curly, from what she could see, done up in a bun with a few braids.
She’d probably call the style pretty if it wasn’t half torn out and covered in semi-dried blood.
Her lips were different. So was her nose, and her jaw, and skin, and – dammnit, her face.
This wasn’t her.
Maya closed her eyes; the image didn’t change when she opened them.
She didn’t know why she bothered trying, that trick hadn’t been working at all lately.
In a daze, she turned on the tap, mumbling a thanks to whatever god was still listening when it turned on, and began washing her hands.
There was soap on the counter, and she applied it liberally.
Hers or not, she was inhabiting this body right now, and she’d be damned if it turned into a zombie because she didn’t thoroughly wash her hands.
After her hands were done, she pulled her shirt off, a silky purple blouse that must have belonged to this body’s previous owner, leaving the sweat stained white under top on below.
She washed up her arms and her neck before dunking her entire head under the faucet.
Maya hissed as the water hit her head, a sharp sting that must have originated from whatever knocked her out in the first place. She pushed through the pain, scrubbing the blood from her skin until she felt a little raw.
A look in the mirror revealed a think cut over a patch of raised skin on the right side of her temple. It was sore when she prodded it, already beginning to purple. Yup, definitely the cause of her headache.
It had also definitely been drenched in zombie blood.
Maya scrubbed it again, ignoring the stinging when she put soap directly on the damn wound. It hurt like hell but there wasn’t much else she could do besides pray it wasn’t infected already.
Her hair was next. The bun was carefully held together with an array of pins that thankfully hadn’t pierced her skull when she’d been hit in the head.
The pins came out one by one, strangely therapeutic as Maya worked on autopilot.
She’d had curls all her life, tighter than these, but she was familiar enough with the hairstyle. Out came the pins, and then the braids, and then she had a halo of slightly matted dark curls.
As much as she didn’t want to bother with wet hair, maya wanted to bother with bloody hair even less.
She sighed.
Into the sink she went once more.
She kept rinsing until the water ran clear, which, coincidentally, is about the time she realised that conserving water might be a good idea.
Dammnit.
She turned off the tap, twisting as much water as she could out of her hair before flipping it back out of her face.
The girl in the mirror looked slightly less deranged.
Damp hair, bruised head, and bloody clothing aside, she truly didn’t look half bad. God, at the very least Maya could be thankful she was still the same race. Small mercies and all that. All this and stuck in the body of a white girl? She’d actually loose it then.
She stood up straight, twisting a little to try and get a good look at herself. At her… new body.
Far as she could tell she was about the same height, given she hadn’t been tripping and falling all over herself in the halls. She wasn’t tall, but a solid build of five foot eight wasn’t terrible either.
Good enough to not be entirely hopeless in a fight, huzzah.
Her skin was a shade or too lighter, covered in a dusting of freckles that you probably wouldn’t have been able to see on her old body.
This body appeared a bit smaller than her own, too. It was frail in a way she hadn’t been since she was a kid. That wasn’t good, and it would have to change quickly if she wanted to keep bashing skulls in with a stick and running for her life. All in all, Maya took a moment to be glad she was wearing pants that were decently manoeuvrable.
Speaking of which…
Maya patted down the pants, delighted to find a lump in either pocket.
One produced a carabineer with a couple of keys (including a car key!) and the other a battered leather wallet.
She tossed the keys on the counter before flipping the wallet open.
A stack of dollar bills, a few business cards, and… her driver’s license.
Or this body’s license, anyway.
Clara Miller.
According to the license she was in Georgia, hopefully on the outskirts of the city as she didn’t recognise the county. Clara was born in ’83, making her… Maya paused as she did the mental math. Damn, Clara was in her forties.
Maya glanced at the mirror; she couldn’t reconcile the number with her reflection.
She wasn’t exactly a spring chicken but… forty? This girl didn’t have a wrinkle or a grey hair in sight.
Clara must have been blessed by the genetic gods.
Maya studied the picture on the license further. Clara was smiling in it, her eyes looked kind.
She wondered if Clara was stuck in her body, waking up in her apartment, confused at the chaos outside and trying to figure out why the hell she was in Indiana. Maya hoped she was, she really did.
Hoped that her being here didn’t mean that Clara was dead.
She swallowed, tucking the license back into the wallet and putting it back in her pocket, trying to get back on task.
Right. Okay.
First, water. Then she’d worry about locating Clara’s car.
A janitor’s closet down the hall yielded three whole buckets and a lovely crowbar, which she quickly exchanged her wooden chair leg for. She stacked the buckets up and carried them back to her bathroom, quickly shoving the first under the faucet and turning it on.
The flow wasn’t exactly powerful so, in the meantime, she retraced her steps and raided the breakroom. Her bloody lump of a first kill was still there, rotting.
Yuck.
She held her nose close the entire time, but the smell was still strong enough to sting her eyes.
The room was relatively barren but, after a lot of digging, she managed to unearth two bottles of water, a pantry full of peanuts, a couple of energy bars, and a single twinkie. She brought all her food back to the bathroom with her, because it seemed sensible to barricade herself near her source of water, no matter how unhygienic it may be.
Plus, it couldn’t be worse than leaving it all in a room with a decomposing body.
On the way back, she almost slipped and dropped her entire haul. Her shoe had lost purchase when she’d stepped on a piece of paper. She flailed, using her crowbar to try and regain control of her balance.
Thankfully, she remained upright.
“Phew.” She mumbled to herself, standing perfectly still with her food clutched to her chest and her crowbar stuck into a cubical wall.
Her foot was still on the piece of paper.
Which, upon closer inspection, was actually a calendar.
She blinked down at it. Someone had been marking down the days to their birthday, big red crosses and a doodled cake on the sixteenth.
It was September.
September, two thousand and ten.
She pursed her lips, finding that, surprisingly, that information didn’t send her into a meltdown. She supposed time travel wasn’t any worse than being stuck in someone else’s body, or maybe she’d just reached her quota for reality altering events for one day.
She went back to her bathroom.
Maya ate her victory twinkie as she filled up the remaining buckets of water, contemplating the logistics of her situation.
She was in Georgia, inhabiting the body of one Clara Miller, the dead were walking, and she was more than a dozen years in the past.
It was hard to conceptualise how this could get much worse – or much weirder.
Maya didn’t even know if this was permanent. Would she wake up some day, back in her own body? Was this all some bizarre dream? Or, more likely, an acid trip? The more she thought about it, the worse her headache got.
Eventually, she came to the conclusion that it didn’t matter.
She was here, now. If she returned to her own body one day, that was all well and good, but she had no control over it. As far as she knew, she’d gone to bed last night and woken up three states over and a decade in the past.
Maya couldn’t think of a single way to get back to her body, let alone her own time.
As her mama used to say, there was no use borrowing worry. There wasn’t any point in panicking over something that may never come to pass. Maya couldn’t operate under the assumption that this was temporary, it wouldn’t do her or Clara any good if she went about acting as if she’d wake up from a dream one day.
The best thing she could do was treat this body as her own and this world as real, because, for now at least, it was.
She nodded to herself as she moved the buckets out of the way, content to mostly put the matter to rest for now.
With her twinkie devoured and three buckets of hopefully drinkable water stored away, Maya had to stop procrastinating.
It was time to find Clara’s car.
Which meant it was time to leave her floor of the office building. Out into the unknown stairwell, and the subsequent outside world. There was a chance that everything was normal out there, but somehow Maya doubted it.
No, out there would be more of the dead. She was sure of it. And all she had to defend herself with was a crowbar and her noodle arms.
Great.
If Clara kept a pair of regular shoes in her car, Maya would consider the whole endeavour worth it.
Part of her wanted to shuck off her heels and make her way barefoot, but the reasonable bit of her brain pointed out how stupid that was when the floor was filled with glass and splinters and zombie blood.
The last thing she needed was to be infected via a bloody piece of glass in her foot.
So, the heels stayed on and off she went.
The stairwell was dimly lit and dusty as all hell. Maya coughed slightly as she made her way down flight after flight.
Three floors down, the dust settled in her nose and she sneezed.
In the quiet, the sound of it almost made her miss the tell-tale groan as she rounded the last flight of stairs.
“Fuck!” She yelped, jumping backwards even as she swung her right arm forward.
One second there was a rotting face lunging at her and the next…
It was smeared against the wall.
Maya blinked.
Okay.
Okay.
That was… fine.
It was even easier than the first dead guy.
She looked down at her bloodied crowbar, tossing it up slightly in appreciation before carefully stepping over the body.
Slightly more confident in her ability to not die, Maya poked her head out the door at the end of the stair well.
Only to almost immediately get swarmed.
No sooner did she stick her head out did a group of zombies try and rush the door. She slammed it shut as quickly as she could, fumbling for the lock as she pushed against the rotting bodies trying to get it open.
Finally, the lock clicked. The banging did not stop as the dead uselessly flung themselves at the door trying to get to her.
Maya huffed out a breath.
Okay, so she was overconfident. Consider her humbled. She may be able to kill them without much trouble, but she was not taking on an entire gang of undead office workers.
On the other side of the stairwell was another door. If the first lead to the outside, this one likely let out to the ground floor of this building.
Maya was more careful this time, repeating her initial caution by sticking her crowbar out first and waiting for a reaction.
Unlike her foray into the office, something came for her crowbar.
The first, Maya was able to put it down with a well placed downwards swing. Another two came around the corner. Thankfully, only one had two working feet. She forced herself to step forward, building momentum so she could whack it upside the skull. While it stumbled, she drove the flat end of her crowbar down into the head of the one crawling towards her.
The second undead bastard was still moaning, picking itself up from where she’d knocked it down. Maya ripped her crowbar free with a squelch and swung towards the noise.
Three for three, she smirked through her heavy breathing as it stopped moving.
When nothing else attacked her, Maya took a moment to survey her surroundings. The first floor was next to empty. Just a receptionist desk (The custodians of which Maya was pretty sure she just mutilated) and an arrary of elevators.
The front wall, made entirely of glass, revealed an empty street.
Considering Maya had just encountered a veritable hoard of the undead on the other side of the building, this did not fill her with confidence.
She fished the carabineer of keys out of her pocket, praying that the car was parked out front because she was not venturing further.
Maya got as close to the glass entrance door as she dared, stuck her hand out and clicked the button on the fob of the car key.
She snatched her hand back inside immediately and held her breath.
A chirp rung out, followed by the sound of a car unlocking.
She waited a minute, then another, but nothing ambled around the side of the building to investigate the noise. Maya refused to look a gift horse in the mouth, steeled herself, and then stepped outside.
Clara’s car (a damn Tacoma, fuck yeah Clara) was practically right in front of the entrance, so in half a dozen quick steps Maya managed to throw herself into the front seat and lock the door behind her. She slunk low in the seat, again waiting for something to come looking for the source of the sound.
And again, nothing.
Maya let out another heavy sigh.
“Shit.” She muttered to herself as she tried to calm down.
There was nothing in the drivers’ side door, but in the passenger side was a thermos water bottle. Maya made a mental note to grab it before she went back upstairs. She flicked open the glove box, finding a mess of papers and receipts, which was next to useless, along with a bottle of pepper spray, which very useful.
Just because she hadn’t run into a living person yet didn’t mean she wouldn’t.
And a person was capable of far worse cruelty than simply eating her.
Maya was still digging through the glove box, mulling over her dark thoughts, when a small, leatherbound notebook tumbled out from the nest of receipts. She reached down into the passenger side and picked it up.
Tucked into the front was a photo.
Clara and a red headed girl, arms wrapped around each other, standing in front of a fountain. Clara was smiling wide, almost like she’d been caught in the middle of a laugh.
Written on the back, in fine cursive script; Clara & Candace, Rome 2005
The proof the Clara had a life, friends, affected Maya more than she thought it would.
She ran her finger, Clara’s finger, over the photo.
It looked well worn, aged. How many times had these hands held this photo? How many times had it been taken out, looked at fondly?
Clara’s heart seized in Maya’s chest.
God, she hoped Clara was out there somewhere.
Somehow, deep down, Maya knew she probably wasn’t.
She flicked the book open, slotting the photo back into it and finding line after line of that same neat handwriting. She glanced over the first couple of lines, swallowing roughly when she realised what she was holding.
It was a diary.
-
It took her three hours and a mental break down to raid the car properly.
Clara, bless her heart, did have shoes in her car: a well-worn pair of hiking boots and a whole change of clothes to go with them. In fact, she had what amounted to a go-bag in the back of her car.
Clothes and camping equipment and protein bars galore.
The truck was fully stocked, plus it had thick cover over the cargo bed which would be the perfect place to sleep when she eventually had to abandon the office.
Clara, apparently, was well prepared for an apocalypse.
It was too bad she was gone before it even properly started.
Maya silently vowed to make use of it all, Clara’s body deserved it.
She left the tent in the car, but she used the sleeping bag to carry near on everything else back inside. Clara’s diary weighed heavily in the inner pocket of her new jacket as she crept quietly back into the building, locking the door only once she was safely (relatively) behind the glass walls.
She had no more zombie run ins that day. A damn miracle considering her shoulder was absolutely killing her. Maya didn’t know if she had another swing in her.
Eventually she made it back to her bathroom.
God, she though mulishly, what a day.
Her sleeping bag wasn’t fantastic, and her back would hurt like a bitch tomorrow, but it was better than nothing.
All in all, she wasn’t doing so bad. She had food, water, a decent weapon. It was all a girl could ask for in the early apocalypse.
It wouldn’t last, of course.
Maya didn’t fancy herself suited to scavenging. She’d handled herself fine so far, but she remembered the panic that seized her when she was faced with the larger group. One on one, she could take those fuckers down, but if they ganged up on her…
All it would take is one bite, one scratch.
No.
She couldn’t risk it.
It was safer to get out of the city.
Less people equals less zombies.
If she was in Georgia there was bound to be a forest nearby. Which meant she could head for the woods outside the city, hike her way up to a safe spot.
She couldn’t hunt for shit, but she could learn. Hell, even canned goods expire. She would have to learn if she wanted to last more than a couple of years in this hellscape.
Maybe she should hit up a library? Find a couple of survival books.
It wasn’t like she could go to a wilderness survival class. Everything she needed to learn she’d have to teach herself.
Shit.
Maya sighed, shuffling around in her sleeping bag.
Tomorrow.
She would find a map, get in her wonderful truck and puzzle her way to a library or a bookstore.
She’d find what she needed and then get the hell out of the city.
Tomorrow.