Zombies of S.H.I.E.L.D.

Complete

She had also tried injecting the rat with every cure she could possibly imagine. She had tried everything from the flu shot to bloody cold medicine. Nothing seemed to even remotely affect it, and she was going nowhere fast. She was starting to lose hope.

The rats had helped Jemma out before; in fact, they had saved her life. She had been exposed to this strange, telekinetic virus that would, eventually, cause her to combust. In an attempt at saving everyone on the plane, she had jumped off the back end, thinking that there was no cure. Fitz saw (after she had knocked him out, of course) that the rat they had exposed to the virus was cured, and he rushed out to save her. Agent Ward was the one to jump out of the plane and inject her, but she still owed so much gratitude to Fitz.

Fitz...the thought of him made her worry. Her best friend had been out there for three days with the rest of the agents, assisting in detecting the infected and guiding the healthy to safety. He had always been fine on the field, but he was nowhere close to being a field agent. She worried about him, no matter how much he insisted that he would be fine.

She tried to shake the thought of him out of her head. His dumb, fluffy hair and his silly Scottish accent. It was hard to imagine him fighting off hordes of...zombies. She still hated to even think of that word.

 Right as she decided to try and infect another rat, she heard the entrance ramp of the plane open. Immediately, she rushed to the ramp, tranquilizer gun at her hip. Were they back? Or was it an intruder?

Her question was answered when she saw Coulson and Agent May helping someone walk, arms slung across their shoulders. She struggled to see who it was and walked closer.

“Simmons!” Coulson yelled, still dragging the injured person along. “I need you to get your medkit immediately.”

She rushed closer. Before she could ask what happened, she watched as May and Coulson dropped Fitz against the side of one of their cars. She ran over to him, her heart racing, panic rising in her chest. She kneeled over and looked at him, immediately grabbing his hand. His usually boyish and happy face was pale, his eyes looking bloodshot, with purple veins snaking across his skin. His breaths came in raspy shakes; he looked like he was about to pass out, or worse.

“What happened to you?” Jemma asked. His eyes slowly locked on hers, and there was something so dreadfully wrong in them. She was so anxious, she thought she might explode.

“Surprise attack,” May answered, closing the entrance ramp.

“He was setting up some traps when a crawler came up from behind,” Coulson added. “Turns out there was a rip in the back of his suit. None of us noticed, but-”

“The zombie did,” Jemma finished. She looked down at his sprawled out legs and saw what looked like a huge bite mark at the back of his ankle. Blood and some sort of purple ooze spread out over his skin, and starting trailing along the veins in his legs.

She looked back up at his face. Not Fitz, she thought. Please, not Fitz. She knew he had been injured on the field before, but it was never like this. It was a bullet to the hand, or getting knocked out, or something else that could be fixed. This was different. This blasted purple goop was going to take her best friend and turn him into a decomposing, cannibalistic monster. She couldn’t bear the thought.

“Hang in there, okay?” She begged, not sure what else to say. “I’m going to clean this up, okay? It’ll be fine. You’ll be fine. Just keep breathing.” She could hear the desperation in her voice, but she didn’t care. She was desperate. No agent had been bitten yet, and Fitz was the first. It was too much.

Skye brought over the medkit. Jemma thanked her, completely forgetting about it in the chaos of what was happening. She quickly scooped as much of the purple goop as she could into various test tubes. She wiped out the wound and was about to sterilize it when Fitz shakily put his hand over hers.