The Plague {One Direction AU}

3. Louis

"For what it's worth," Paolo rasped, his crisp accent marred by his illness, "I'm proud to be a cock-sucking second stringer for this team." He trotted away, and Louis couldn't help but smile, his eyebrows raised in surprise, wishing he was brave enough to say the same. 

The team was all second stringers today, Louis realized, looking around the field. No, wait. There were some third stringers too. As proud as he was, this was so fucking pointless. The referee blew his whistle to signal for the captains to come out to the field. And then the game commenced. At first, it was like any ordinary game, but then more and more players went down coughing uncontrollably, with equally ill players subbed in in their place.

By the second period, the game was downright pathetic. No one was even running top speed. The ball was passed between players almost lazily, and Louis found it easy to swipe it away from the opposing team. He dodged around their extended limbs without difficulty, making his way to the net. Their goalie leaned over, coughing. Louis hesitated for a moment, but just a moment. He had never scored a goal for this team during an actual game before. Keeping his eye on the defender, Louis angled his kick just right, and the ball bounced against the back net and dropped to the ground.

"Yes!" Louis threw his hands in the air in triumph. "Haha!" He rounded to high five his team mates.

They were all down on the grass, some coughing weakly, others completely unmoving. They were all down. His team. The other team. The coaches. The referees.

He turned back to the net behind him. The goalie was collapsed on his side, no sign of movement.

There was Paolo, face down in the grass, his legs splayed out awkwardly. "Jesus. What the fuck?" He cast his eyes to the stands, jogging over to the bench again. There was nothing, no movement, other than some paper and leaves lifted into the air by the light wind still blowing. Panic and paranoia set in. It's that fucking weed, he told himself, trying to calm down. That fucking weed must be laced with some serious shit, and this...he breathed...this is all a hallucination.

He closed his eyes, breathing deeply, waiting for the usual soccer match sounds to return: the squawking of fans and seagulls, the random interludes of music, the ring of the referees whistle.

There was nothing but the rustle of the rubbish in the breeze.

He reluctantly opened his eyes and stared around the dead arena again. "Fuck this," he said to no one. To himself. To the rubbish in the breeze.

He walked determinedly to the clubhouse door, past the now dead douchebag hecklers, pushing through to the locker room. He showered and dressed back in his street clothes quickly, making his way out to his car in a rush.

But damn, the gate was closed. He looked around frantically until his eyes came to rest on a pair of feet sticking out by the kiosk.

"Fuck," he muttered, climbing back out of his Mercedes. "Fuckfuckfuck." He reached the little shack. Bryce, the friendly little twink of a guard, was sprawled on his back, dead. "Fuck," Louis breathed again, reaching to press the button to lift the gate and lock it open. "You were such a sweet lad," he muttered, shaking his head again.

He got back in his car and drove out of there, foot pressing down on the accelerator wildly. The roads were jammed with traffic, cars filled with more immobile forms. Louis felt like he was in a horror movie, like he was being haunted. He wove through the stopped vehicles carefully, just wanting to get home and shut himself into his little hillside haven.

It took him eight hours. Eight hours to travel from Carson to Beverly Hills, which usually took 30 minutes. Eight fucking hours to go less than 25 miles. After two hours of scraping the sides of his precious convertible along walls and stopped cars, he finally had to get out. He had tried to maneuver around a particularly bad patch of cars, only to get stuck behind another wall of vehicles. He could have pushed some out of the way, but he would have had to put the cars in neutral, which meant reaching into the cars, which was more than he could handle right now. Instead, he tried to reverse out of there, retrace his path. But then the car became wedged. And he was forced to walk.