Zombie fic! Part Three

[triedunture]

The Rampant Disease, Part 3
Pairing: House/Wilson (finally)
warnings: violence, horror, gore and icky stuff.
summary: Wilson comes back to vacation and...where is everyone? Surprise! Zombie attack!

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The eleventh floor was quiet and dark. Stepping out of the elevator behind House and Foreman, Wilson could see the deep blue of the night sky from the windows at the end of the hall. There were a few stars, white dots against a thick blanket, but no moon. The only real light in the hallways was the harsh red emergency lights that made everything look like it was being heated in a fast food joint.

House cocked his head to the side, listening for any movement. Appearing satisfied, he motioned to Foreman to go ahead. The younger doctor wheeled the incubator towards the nearest surgery room.

“Coast looks clear,” he called to them, pushing open the door and peering inside.

The three men wasted no time preparing the instruments for a biopsy. Foreman found a surgeon’s drill in its usual spot in one of the lower cabinets. He plugged it in, pressed the power button once, and the drill roared to life for a moment. “It looks like we’ve still got some juice in the room,” he said.

“I can’t find any sterilized needles,” Wilson said, checking the metal trays. He held up one thin sliver of metal that measured about a foot long. “This one’s been unwrapped already.”

“Screw it, the kid’s already dead. It’ll have to do,” House said with a wave of his hand. He was opening all the cabinets, pausing when he found some safety restraints. He gave a shout of approval and leaned his cane against the door so he could carry his find in both hands.

Inside the incubator, the small zombie was pressing its head against the clear plastic dome, moaning without end. Wilson tried not to look at the thing too much. The idea of carving up something that had once been a human child was disturbing enough, but the state of the zombie’s decomposing body was another nightmare entirely.

The zombie’s little fingers and toes, fragile parts even on a normal baby, had mostly rotted away, leaving only one or two digits on each stump of a limb. Parts of the cheeks and lips had also worn off, revealing the inside of the infant’s gummy mouth. Its jaws flapped open and shut as if it was gnashing its teeth, though it had none. The eyes were dark and sunken, possibly blind at this point. It was naked, which made sense, Wilson thought; it looked only a few days old. The baby had probably still been in its swaddling clothes when it was…

He shut his eyes for a moment. Best not to think about what had happened to it. He glanced at the drooling creature once more. The rate of decay was so pronounced, he was having difficulty telling whether it had been a boy or a girl.

“Let’s get this show on the road,” House muttered, brushing Wilson aside to open the incubator.

“Hey—” Wilson’s protests went unheard as House tipped the device on its wheels, letting the small zombie roll out onto the exam table.

“What? Worried about head trauma?” House asked as he tossed the nylon restraining ropes across the bewildered infant’s chest and legs. “Make yourself useful and get the other side, quick.”

Wilson sighed heavily, but followed House’s directions. As he took hold of the other end of the straps, the zombie seemed to realize it was being trapped again and began to thrash with an incredible amount of force.

“Jesus!” Foreman cursed, jumping slightly as the thing snarled and keened. “Are you sure you guys can keep it down? Why don’t we just sedate it?”

“Its heart’s stopped. No blood flow. No way to inject a sedative,” House bit out, fighting to keep his grip on the slick nylon. He held the straps firmly against the table, his fingers safely out of reach. Wilson followed his example and the zombie was more or less immobilized.

“Hurry up, Foreman,” Wilson said, flicking his eyes to the neurologist.

The fellow did not seem pleased with the situation, but he went ahead with fitting the head restraint over the zombie’s small skull. The zombie tried to snap at his hands, but the braces stopped any progress it may have made. “The light in here is all wrong,” Foreman complained, waving his hand to indicate the strange, washed-out color everything had under the emergency lights.

“Live with it. And double up on your gloves,” House suggested, tipping his chin towards the cardboard box on the counter behind Wilson. “You don’t want to die because a toothless zombie infected you with its body fluids in surgery. That would be lame.”

“Yeah, sure,” Foreman snorted, snapping the gloves over his hands. “You’d rather I died in a blaze of glory, some sort of self-sacrifice for the greater good.”

“Nope, you’re not the hero of this story,” House said, his dark gaze fastened on Wilson’s face. “Leave it to the White Knight here to leap stupidly into the fray.”

“I wasn’t trying—” Wilson began.

“Oh, stop it. Just stop,” House sneered. “Even when they’re dead, you can’t resist coming to the aid of a damsel in distress. It’s fine to take down a few zombies then. Otherwise, it’s just wrong.” House drew out the O in ‘wrong’ for several seconds.

“I’m going to start drilling now. You two can argue later,” Foreman said from behind his paper surgical mask. He thumbed the drill, and the noise drowned out any reply Wilson might have made. They had to hold onto the restraints tightly as the zombie began to spasm. House redoubled his efforts as well, but he didn’t take his eyes off Wilson’s across the table.

When the drilling stopped and Foreman began the delicate process of inserting the biopsy needle, Wilson cleared his throat.

“She was my friend,” he said softly. “She didn’t deserve…that.”

“Yeah, I know,” House said, his face tight and weary. He looked over at Foreman’s progress, then at the floor. “But if you want to live through this, Wilson, you have to learn how to deal. You can’t let your emotions dictate your responses. If you do, then this is you getting eaten.” He made a face of wide-eyed panic, glancing around the room for unseen attackers. Then House schooled his face into a mask of seriousness. “And this is me, thinking clearly and saving your ass. So watch it.”

Wilson looked away and nodded silently.

“I got it,” Foreman announced, removing the needle from the brain tissue. “Not the most graceful biopsy I’ve ever done, but the sample looks good.”

“Fantastic. Let’s start testing it,” House said. He glanced down at the small zombie on the table. The thing was dribbling saliva down its chin, its mouth opening and closing with less ferocity than before. “Little fella’s tuckered out. Who wants to put him out of his misery?”

Foreman shook his head, disgusted. “It’s all yours.”

“Wilson?” House quirked an eyebrow at his friend. “Want to have a whack at it?”

Wilson could feel his face crumple helplessly. “I can’t,” he said. “You know I can’t.”

House chewed on his bottom lip and glanced over his shoulder at Foreman, who was busy placing the sample into a sterilized container. He didn’t seem to be paying them any mind. House turned back to Wilson and said, “Let go of the restraints and hand me my shovel. Leave the room; you don’t have to see this.”

Wilson slowly let go of the straps, and the zombie only raised its arms weakly into the air. Once he was certain the thing wasn’t going to jump off the table and bite them, Wilson found House’s blue pack and extracted Betsy the Shovel.

“I’ll stay,” Wilson said, handing the tool out to House, their eyes meeting over the table again. “I’ll be fine.”

House took the snow shovel out of Wilson’s grasp. “You know it’s not a kid anymore,” he pointed out. “It’s just a dead body with an illness inside it.”

“Just do it,” Wilson said. “Please.”

House pursed his mouth like he sometimes did when he was about to argue, but he wordlessly placed the shovel on the zombie’s thin, wobbly neck and chopped it cleanly in two.

“Sorry,” he muttered, though Wilson couldn’t tell who it was directed at.

“Guys, we might have a problem,” Foreman called. “What if the emergency power on this floor doesn’t cover the lab? I need the electron microscope to even begin to look at this.” He held the sample aloft.

House looked around the surgery room and set his shovel down on the table. “There should be portable backup generators on this floor. The surgeons need them in case there’s a blackout in the middle of an operation. There’s got to be one close by; I’ll check the next room over.”

He hobbled through the connecting door without his cane, as he often did in cramped quarters. Wilson watched him leave with a heavy sigh.

“Hey, you doing okay?” Foreman asked him with a frown. “I’ve had a few days to, you know, let this all sink in. But you just got thrown in the middle of everything.” He glanced at the motionless pieces of the zombie on the exam table. “Things certainly have gotten weird, haven’t they?”

“Sure have,” Wilson said quietly, his gaze settling on the dead zombie as well. “Foreman,” he asked, “do you think any of us are going to make it out of here alive?”

“I don’t know,” he said, collecting more tools on a wheeled cart. “House seems to know what he’s doing.”

There was a sudden burst of moaning from the next room over, and Wilson and Foreman spun around in horror. Above the room, in the viewing station, were five adult-sized zombies pressed up against the glass window. Through the glass walls, Wilson could see House standing directly beneath them, his face turned upwards towards the sound.

The largest one, a bald man wearing maintenance overalls, smashed his fist through the plate glass, and the zombies tumbled into the room below like lemmings.

“House!” Wilson screamed, sprinting into the next surgery room as quickly as his ankle would allow.

The older doctor had narrowly avoided being crushed by diving out of the way, but now he was pinned on the floor by the handful of attackers. One, an Asian girl with pigtails (Wilson recognized her as a resident), was crawling towards his feet. House grabbed a number nine scalpel that had dropped to the floor and stabbed it deep into her eye socket. The zombie screamed, tossing its head from side to side as if to dislodge it.

The zombie in overalls rose to its feet and leaned down to grab House’s neck. House punched him in the face, buying a few seconds to crawl behind an overturned metal table for cover.

“What are you standing around for!?” he shouted. “Run, you idiots!”

Wilson glanced back at Foreman, who seemed to be frozen in fear. No help there. Wilson looked around the room wildly for something he could use as a weapon. His eyes landed on a bulky piece of equipment on the ground beside his feet.

“Wilson!” House was now using an IV stand like a lion tamer would use a chair, jabbing it in the zombies’ faces when their jaws came too close. “Are you deaf? Get out of here!”

Wilson bent and grasped the instrument in his clammy hands. He straightened, eyeing the five zombies. All their attention was on House, the most vulnerable prey in the room. Their backs were to Wilson, and he calculated the amount of time this would take.

“What the fuck are you doing?” House continued, his voice reaching a fever-pitch. “Go!”

“House, this is me, thinking clearly,” Wilson said, “and saving your ass.” He clicked the power button, and the bone saw whirred to life. “Get down!” he ordered House, screaming to be heard over the buzzing racket.

The Asian girl was first, since she was closer than the others. Wilson flung the saw towards her throat, not unlike a chainsaw maneuver he had often seen in one of House’s video games. The saw cut through the spinal cord well enough, but Wilson was not prepared for the spray of viscous black fluid as the blade sliced through her neck. He squeezed his eyes shut as an arc of foul-smelling ooze hit him in the face.

Well, guess I’m also doing this blind, he thought.

The zombies were slow to react, and Wilson found the next one easily, even with his eyes closed. The saw buzzed through, perhaps not the neck, but a reasonable chunk of skull. Wilson heard the body fall to the floor, and that was good enough for him.

Another, and then another, and another fell under the bone saw, until the moans had ceased and the only sound in the room was the wet noise of the saw and Wilson’s own ragged breathing. He clicked the machine off and let it drop to the floor with a clang. The putrid fluid covered him head to toe, it seemed. When he felt it dripping off his bangs, he fought the urge to vomit.

Then the room erupted with House’s curses. “Foreman, my cane!” he managed in between epithets. Wilson, his eyes still closed, felt House’s long fingers close around his arm. “Don’t open your eyes, and don’t speak. The only thing we know for certain is this thing is spread through fluids, and you have enough crap on you to infect Texas.”

Wilson nodded to show he understood, his mouth sealed in a grim line. He felt House pulling him in another direction, and he limped alongside him.

“Grab the generator in the corner,” House ordered Foreman. “Take it to the lab and start the tests.”

“You want me to go by myself?” Foreman asked, his voice laced with panic.

“I’ll be there in a minute. You can take Betsy,” House offered. Wilson heard him shove open a door, and soon they were walking swiftly down the hallway.

“Of all the incredibly stupid things you could have done in a situation like that,” House ranted, obviously taking advantage of the fact that Wilson couldn’t talk back. “I told you to run, and what do you do? You do the exact opposite of running! You sit there, like a, a, a willing victim.”

Wilson wished he could risk a peek at House’s face. He’d never heard the other man so upset. House slammed his way through another door and Wilson could feel cold tile under his bare, sprained foot.

“You’re going to get yourself killed,” House hissed. “Or bitten, and then I’ll have to kill you myself. And I can’t—” Wilson felt House’s puffing breath against his neck as he sighed. “I can’t kill any more friends. I’m down to the last one, actually.”

House led Wilson through the new room before positioning him on the tile floor. Wilson heard the crank of a faucet and scalding hot water began falling down on his head. He jumped, but didn’t open his mouth. Locker room, then.

Quick, clever fingers pulled away his tie and began unbuttoning his shirt. “I’m afraid your fancy French clothes did not survive,” House muttered. “No amount of Shout will save them now.” The wet shirt was peeled from his shoulders and fell with a plop to the shower floor.

Wilson helped the process by toeing off his remaining loafer and sock, and undoing his belt buckle. His filthy pants fell around his ankles, and he wondered if House would let him keep his boxers. But House didn’t seem satisfied until Wilson was completely divested of his contaminated clothing, and he shoved at the waistband of the boxers until they, too, fell to the floor.

Wilson heard the squeak squeak squeak of the soap dispenser, and then House’s hands were scrubbing across his face and hair. The clean smell of disinfectant soap filled Wilson’s nostrils, and for the first time since he’d picked up the bone saw, his heart seemed to slow its frantic pace.

“Idiot. Moron. Putz.” House continued soaping up his hands and rubbing the fluid from Wilson’s skin, punctuating each ministration with a new insult. “Feather-headed bird brain. Stupid sack of shit.” Then English seemed to fail him, because he slipped into a string of Japanese that sounded much more offensive, even if Wilson didn’t understand it.

For his part, Wilson stood still and allowed the warm water and foreign slurs to wash over him. He let House scrub his legs, stomach and back until they were clean. House’s steady hands roamed up his shoulders and neck to his face, where he roughly rubbed the soap over Wilson’s eyelids. Then the hands moved back to his hair, threading through the strands at the back of his head and squeezing out the excess water until House was satisfied that all the goo was gone.

All the steam seemed to leave House, and he leaned his forehead against Wilson’s. He cupped Wilson’s face between his hands and swiped at his lips with his thumbs. “Yaro,” he whispered weakly. “Baka yaro.”

Wilson swallowed past the lump in his throat. House was standing very close to him, his wet over-shirt sticking to Wilson’s side. “Can I open my eyes now?” he asked.

House shifted away, murmuring, “Yeah.”

Wilson blinked his eyes open, letting them adjust to the dim light of the empty locker room and the sting of the soap. He looked down at his naked body, clean and without injury, save for his wrapped foot. House was reaching for his cane, which had been hooked over the shower partition. His jeans, sneakers and shirts were soaked from standing in the shower. He refused to meet Wilson’s gaze.

“We need to talk,” Wilson said.

“I’ve already said all I’m going to say,” House muttered. “I’ve run out of bad names to call you.”

“I’m serious, House.” Wilson turned the shower spray off and stood there, arms wrapped around his middle, trying not to look like a drowned rat. “Before I left for Maine, you—”

“Do you think we could drop this for just a little—”

“—came into my office and before I knew what was happening—”

“—while, at least until this whole walking dead thing gets cleared—”

“You kissed me!” Wilson finished, his voice rising above House’s. “You kissed me,” he repeated, quieter.

House finally looked over at him then, leaning on his cane with both hands. “I hate to tell you this,” he said, “but we have bigger problems to worry about. Here’s a hint: starts with a Z.” He grabbed a dry towel that was hanging on a hook out of the reach of the shower spray and tossed it at Wilson’s face.

Wilson caught the towel and started rubbing it over his wet hair. “It’s why I came back here,” Wilson said, refusing to let the subject drop. “When I couldn’t get a hold of you after I left, I thought…I don’t know what I thought. But I came back to the hospital to talk to you. I was worried.”

“Well, now that we’ve decided who’s to blame for Jimmy’s Big Zombie Adventure…” House limped out of the shower and headed down a row of lockers.

“I’m not blaming you!” Wilson called after him, wiping the water off his body and throwing the towel to the floor. He followed House, struggling to keep up with his sore ankle. Wilson fought the shivers that shot through his naked body as he walked. “I just want you to tell me—”

“What?” House turned around abruptly to face him. “You want me to confess all those nasty pent-up feelings that I wanted to explore with a silly little kiss? Which, I might add, made you sputter something lame about traffic and scamper out the door like a frightened—”

Wilson threw his hands up in the air in frustration. “I was confused! Shocked. Surprised. I mean, where did that come from, House?”

House set his mouth into a thin line, his eyes shining like hard glass. He turned to one of the lockers and opened it. “You have two choices, pink or blue.” He held up two sets of scrubs.

Wilson sighed and rubbed his chilly bare arms. “Blue,” he said.

“Pink it is.” House threw the pink ones at him, which he caught in one hand. As Wilson glowered at him, he began shucking his own wet jeans and shirts to change into the blue scrubs.

“So we’re not going to talk about this?” Wilson needled, leaning against a low bench to tug on the clean clothes. He saw a pair of plastic sandals under the bench, probably someone’s shower shoes, and slipped them on his bare feet.

House pulled the blue surgical scrubs over his head before answering. “How about we figure a way out of this mess first?” he said. “Then we can talk until next doomsday.”

Wilson searched his friend’s face for any signs of humor or falsehood, but found none. How like House, he thought, to keep his feelings at arms’ length while death was knocking on the door. He’d seen it before House’s leg surgery, with Stacy. He’d seen it after House’s gunshot wounds, when the ketamine began to fail. But what he was seeing now was a promise, a pact.

Make it through this alive, House was saying, and I’ll tell you how I feel.

He touched House’s shoulder gingerly, feeling the powerful muscles shifting under skin and cloth. House looked up at him, but didn’t pull away. Wilson nodded, letting a small smile play across his lips. “It’s a deal,” he said.

Even in the dim light, Wilson could see House’s blue eyes taking on that bright spark he sometimes got when working a difficult case, or watching a dumb movie. Or walking down the hall, or drinking coffee.

With me, Wilson realized. Only with me. How long have I failed to notice?

“House,” he whispered, daring to lean in a little bit closer, parting his lips just slightly. “House, I…”

A high-pitched screech echoed through the locker room, and the two men broke apart, startled. House grabbed his cane and whirled around, looking for the source of the noise. Wilson turned too, his eyes widening his saucers.

“Oh shit.”

They were surrounded. At both ends of the aisle of lockers, throngs of zombies were moaning and slouching towards them. There were dozens, maybe even fifty. Wilson looked at his empty hands; no weapon to fend them off.

“What are we going to do?” he asked, standing back to back with House.

“Think you can give me a leg up?” House asked, his words coming so fast Wilson nearly missed them.

“What?”

House cupped his hands like a ladder step in demonstration. “A leg up! Come on, come on.”

Wilson dutifully laced his fingertips together and bent at the waist, allowing House to shove his soggy Nike into the hold. Keeping a tight grip on his cane, House boosted himself up and clambered onto the top of the lockers.

“Take my hand,” he said, reaching down for Wilson.

Wilson glanced at the approaching zombies on both sides. His foot was killing him and he wasn’t sure he could make the climb like House had.

“For the love of…” House’s hands snaked down and grabbed Wilson by the wrists, hauling him forcibly up onto the lockers. It seemed impossible to Wilson for House to have lifted him straight into the air like that with nothing to keep him from tumbling down himself, but the man seemed to be possessed by a strength born of panic.

Wilson curled into the small space between the top of the lockers and the ceiling. Some of the taller zombies reached up towards them, and Wilson yanked his feet away from the edge, away from their groping hands. Beside him, House was panting with exertion. A decaying hand pawed at his hair, and he batted it away with his cane.

Wilson surveyed the sea of zombies that had surrounded their little island. He sighed. “Now what?” he asked.


Continue to Part 4.