The Zombie Apocalypse with MCR (Complete)

Small Favours

I wake early, so early it burns my eyes to peel them open.

My shoulder aches, and my arm feels a little useless, but I manage to sit up without making a noise. The painkillers I gulp down help too.

Frank is asleep on his stomach, one hand tucked under his face, mouth half-open. His hood is pulled up, his black hair a mess around his face.

He doesn't wake as I get up and prepare to leave. Pandora stays quiet, as does Alissa as I fetch her from one of the bunks. She's bleary-eyed and yawning, but seems relieved when I tell her we're returning home.

I tuck the blanket over Frank, and leave a thank you note on one of the tables.

The car park is empty enough. I only have to kill three corpses, and Lissa even does her part in taking down another two. The car is where we left it, sat like a chariot in the blue morning light.

"Natalie is going to flip." Alissa says tiredly as I spin the car out onto the main road.

Natalie does flip.

She's waiting for us on the bottom stair, dozing against the banister. She's got a blanket around her shoulders and deep shadows under her eyes. She doesn't react as the door snicks closed behind us, but Pandora barks, and she straightens with a little shriek.

When she manages to register that we're stood in front of her, largely okay, she hits the fucking roof. She shouts and hollers, and Mark is even forced from bed. He thumps down the stairs and sits in a dressing gown, blinking heavily as he watches Natalie scream at us.

"What if you had never come back?!" She demands, over and over again. Alissa and I stand there and take it, but Pandora slinks away to the kitchen, tail between her legs.

For about half an hour, we don't move. We accept our fate together, and let Natalie kick our asses, in a verbal sense. When she feels like she's driven her point home, she stomps up the stairs, giving Mark a nasty shove on her way past.

"You ever do that to me again, I'll kill the both of you myself!" She snarls without looking back.

Mark glances after her, wincing. Then he turns to us and raises his eyebrows.

"Breakfast?" He asks.

He must have missed us, because Alissa and I don't have to lift a finger. Mark cooks us sausage sandwiches dripping with tomato sauce, and he even washes the dishes afterwards. While we eat, we tell him of our adventure. If it can be called that.

"Gerard and Mikey?" Mark frowns. He's scrubbing a pan, bubbles up to his elbows, but his eyes are distant as he stares out the window. "That sounds familiar."

I scrub my hands over my face, wincing as I shift my left arm too quickly. It's still pulsing. Now that I've had something to eat, I fish more painkillers out of my bag.

"In a tour bus?" Mark dumps the pan on the draining board and turns to stare at us, wiping his hands on a dish towel. "Where the hell did they find that?"

"This thing was crazy!" Alissa gushes, and gives Mark an inch by inch description of the vehicle. I sit through it patiently, testing my shoulder by shifting and stretching it in my seat. "They were actually kinda... Nice." Liss shrugs, "The guys, I mean. They weren't like... Wary of us at all."

"Idiotic of them," I mutter, "We could have been the type of people to kill them in their sleep and steal that bus of theirs. They didn't even ask us to give up the weapons."

"Don't pretend you didn't like them." Alissa frowns, "You wouldn't have given up that food if you hadn't liked them, no matter how hungry they were."

"Do you honestly think so low of me?" I roll my eyes, "I couldn't very well not feed them when they'd asked us to stay so easily."