Chapter Text
PART ONE: UNICORNS AND BUNNIES
Deadpool barrels down the hazardous, litter-strewn street of Old Grave New York, racing past the gridlike structures of broken asphalt and rusty street signs. He needs a hiding spot, a place to drop down and lie down while things blow over, but he knows from experience that trying to find shelter inside one of the various buildings around him is one bad fucking idea. Too many shadows and tight spaces—too little elbow room and way too fucking risky.
So, options limited as they are, the alley on the right will have to do. Scrambling between dusty, broken-down vehicles, he makes his way across the street in a mad, desperate dash. His eyes flicker up to the windows above him. No Shriekers. At least he's got that going for him. His feet skid across the debris of decaying newspaper and cardboard, and he grunts as he crashes into a dumpster full of years-old trash. The loud thud of two hundred-plus pounds of pure muscle barreling into rusty aluminum is deafening as it ricochets down the alley.
"Oh, fuck me in the-" Deadpool hisses, his voice barely a whisper in the gut-wrenching silence that comes after. Snarling under the thin red fabric of his mask, he peers down the alleyway, a dead end, just his luck.
Though really, it is pretty on par with his whole day so far. Luck, it seems, has soured recently. And it all started with his apartment getting overrun by the undead monsters of the apocalypse. Unable to stop the horde, he'd been forced to run from the neighborhood he'd deemed as his safe zone. To top it off, racing from certain death led to him running right into a fucking rancid trash bin. Which culminated in this moment right here, him trapped in unknown territory, cursing out a dumpster under his breath in Spanish.
With no other option, taking up a defensive position is the only advantage. Hoping for some sort of higher ground, he eyes the garbage bin. It's no hill to die on, but it will have to do. The metal of the trash bin grits against his palms as he grasps onto the edge of it and heaves himself upward onto the lid. His katanas sing through the air as he unsheathes them and jumps a couple of times on the plastic beneath him to test his footing. It creaks ominously but holds.
"Heads and arms. Heads and arms." He chants, bouncing in place until the keening sound of hungry voices reaches him. The noise is followed by the earth-shuddering sound of dozens of feet on hot asphalt. The smell comes next, death and decay, and the sickly sweet scent of infection. Opening his mouth, he sucks in a shallow inhale through the fabric of his mask, his ragged breath suffocating and humid against his face.
The stumbling mass of bodies that makes its way into the front of the alley is a common sight. Sick, broken bodies with rotting limbs and black bite marks littering their skin. These are the unlucky ones. The people who "survived." The infected. Zombies.
The whole group of them is in varying states of decay. One woman with a broken leg stumbles and collapses, quickly overwhelmed by her co-zombies, or whatever a group of zombies is called. He thought he remembered the word "horde." Good word— it pretty much summed up the stumbling mass. The really old, decrepit ones look almost skeletal and move slowly. While the newer ones, which have only recently been turned, are much faster. If not for their sickly pallor, he might have thought them alive still.
If he didn't have a problem shedding blood before the zombie apocalypse, he most definitely doesn't now. His katanas sing through the air, a keening trill so familiar it lightens his mood.
"Alright, ladies, time to step up and cut up…." He croons in a voice barely above a whisper. Sucking in a deep breath, he sends Bae sliding through the head of a sixty-something librarian. He imagines she had a nice job once upon a time. A white picket fence, maybe a dog that shit on her green grass every morning. His blade catches on a neck bone, and he grunts, powering through solid bones as he curses himself for not sharpening her more thoroughly. He follows through with the swing, managing to gut a teen girl. Bea snags as she chops the hands of a rather grabby grandpa. That one had probably been a perv back in the day, hitting on all the ladies and getting slapped on the regular.
His other katana, Arthur, follows up, twirling in the air with a flick of his wrist like a windmill of terror. She delves into the skull of some chick wearing a wig. Prostitute, he knows that for a fact, they'd hooked up once. Blood splatters through the air in dark black swaths, splashing the ground with rotting viscera and the stink of death, and he thinks to himself that it is such a waste. She had such nice...nibbly bits.
He doesn't gag at the smell. He's too used to it to notice anymore. There's no time to think about the little girl he chops down with a brutal blow across the spine. He barely flinches at the mop of brunette hair on a 20-something kid that sparks painful, deeply buried memories, slicing through the poor kid's skull with a clinical detachment.
Skull, spine, arm, hand, arm, spine, skull, gut, skull. He chants his hits over and over again in the back of his head. Until even his almost inexhaustible strength starts to wane, and he can't breathe through the stitch in his side.
He's standing on a pile of corpses that expands around the dumpster in an ever-widening circle. His boots slip against the blood-slick surface beneath him. He snarls as he drops perilously close to gaping teeth and grabbing hands. Scrambling back out of their reach, the only thing he can hear is the shrieking wail of the dead. When he looks up, it's only to see the growing wall of bodies surrounding him, more of them drawn to the sound of the fight.
"Well, shit's looking fucking bleak!" He barks at the closest zombie, unable to bring his voice above a whisper despite his perilous situation. Taking the man's severed arm, he uses it to backhand another zombie sneaking up behind him. It's sent reeling backward into the mass of the dead.
His foot slips against the metal lid, and he has enough presence of mind to sheath Bea before he crashes to his ass. Arthur delves deep into the depths of the corpses beneath his feet. With a squelch of moldy lungs, his arm follows through, bursting into the depths of a chest cavity.
That's fucking nasty, and he only has a second to dwell on the fact that he's holding someone's heart before his legs are yanked hard towards the open maws of the undead horde in front of him.
An awkward kick sends some dentures flying and caves in a rotting skull. Choking back a shout, Deadpool struggles with his holster, unclipping the thing with practiced ease before bringing his Desert Eagle pistol up and slamming the trigger down. His aim is accurate as fuck, because he's a trained mercenary, and once upon a time, he did this shit for fun. Brain matter splashes outward as the bullet slams into its new home. The hands grasping his leg go limp.
The sound of shots firing is shockingly loud and rings in his ears. He flinches from the overbearing sound of it but uses the momentary lapse to struggle to his feet.
Around him, the zombies react to the sound just as expected, starting up an excited shrieking that drowns out even the gasps of his frantic breathing. Their movements become aggressive, and they start fighting each other to get to the source of the noise, tearing each other apart in a seething mass of limbs and rotten skin.
Chest heaving for much-needed oxygen, he only has a second to decide on a course of action.
There's no getting away. The fuckers have blockaded the alley end to end, crushing each other against the brick walls and old asphalt. He can see more coming, drawn to the sound of the gunshots.
"Looks like today is my lucky fucking day." The sense of dread he always feels these days doubles inside, making it hard to think. There's no way out. No lucky fire escape to climb or door to break through.
The boxes in his head are silent - their normal state now that the world has ended. They offer no nasty rhetoric or snappy remarks to help him out. It is pretty damn remarkable that he is at his most sane now that the world has ended and nobody is left.
It makes his situation all the bleaker. End of the line, three years of fucking hell, and this is the end. He shoots off another round at a zombie that manages to climb the pile of corpses. The bullet flies through its skull and the dome of the one following behind it. Three more take their place, climbing up over the fallen corpses. There are way too many. He's probably got half the city heading towards him at this very moment.
"Jesus in a fucking tutu." His chest heaves with every breath, and he feels like he's suffocating in his mask, the air harder and harder to inhale through the fabric. Yanking the damn thing off his head, he tucks it in a pocket before palming his pistol tighter and reaching for an extra clip.
"Right, okay, that's how it's going to fucking be." Taking a deep breath, he raises the familiar weight and slams home three more bullets from the barrel. "Three, four, five." The bodies fall before him. Turning in place, he does the same in a broad swath around him. It's instinct to eject the clip at round seven and slam home another. The familiar sound of bullets biting through flesh is comforting as he takes down as many of the bastards as he can get.
"Twelve, thirteen-" His breath hitches as the final round enters the chamber, heart picking up its pace until it's racing against his ribcage. "Right, Wade, nothing but unicorns and bunnies." He gasps, bringing the gun up under his scarred chin and turning his gaze up to the pure blue sky.
He has no way of knowing if this will work. He's blown his brains out plenty of times before and always comes back . He can only hope not to feel himself being ripped to pieces. He's going to regenerate; he doesn't have that out, and when he does, he'll probably be a mindless killing machine.
"Shit, I'm going to be a fucking terrifying zombie." He swallows, his Adam's apple bobbing against the sight of his gun. That's what he fears the most, the monster that will be set free once the virus takes over.
There's a flash of red above him, but he hardly notices, not when he feels cold fingers yank on his arm, jerking him back towards the horde. "Unicorns and bun-" The pull of his finger sends the hammer home, and he has time to grunt out a sound of pain before everything goes into a shocking red light of pain and then blissful darkness.