Chapter Text
It was half past three in the morning, according to the last working clock Bonnibel could find.
Her last test subject was dead.
She put her pen down and sighed. She’d been hopping from lab to lab since the apocalypse went down, forced to move away when the generators shut down or they ran out of food or the place was swamped by zombies. But this one was, by far, the most promising one they’d found. She’d managed to fix the solar panels on the roof, and they’d lucked out by finding a mostly intact greenhouse.
They had a farm running, complete with potatoes and carrots and even some greens. And Finn and Jake had found half a dozen chickens in one of their supply runs, so now they had the semblance of a normal diet. It had taken them weeks to clear out the whole university facility from zombies, and though they were thorough, they still found strays every once in a while. But the results were more than worth it.
They were fed and safe. And free. It was more than she could say for most of the human population. Sighing, Bonnie tapped the glass of her ant farm. The insects scurried under the earth, active and alive and currently un-zombified. Cordyceps was hard to work with, because it infected arthropods and humans and seemingly nothing else.
She stared at her in-vitro cell cultures, where mycelium spread over glass plaques. There were dozens of them, all equally unpromising except for the last one, where not a single spore grew. A piece of tape on the corner labeled it “M”.
As if hearing her thoughts, Marceline knocked on the door, startling her out of her skin. Bonnie rubbed her eyes. “Come in.”
“Hey. It’s late.” She had a cup of something warm on her hands, and Bonnie felt a pang of gratitude. “How’s the sciency stuff going?”
Bonnie took the cup from her hands and sipped. They had limited options of drinks, and she knew for a fact that Marcy hid whatever coffee they found to save it for her. The boys were attempting to grow coffee in the greenhouse, but it was a work in progress. “I hate to ask this of you, but we might need to capture a new specimen soon.”
“You killed another one?”
Bonnie sighed. “Antifungal agents are very toxic. Here,” she tapped the second of her samples. “This is Cordyceps versus Amphotericin B. And here,” She tapped the third glass, “This is Cordyceps versus Voriconazole.”
“What’s this one?” Marceline leaned over the fourth sample, where spore growth was significantly diminished.
“Flucytosine and Amphotericin in attack dosages.”
“This is promising.”
“Yeah, if you don’t need kidneys. Or a liver. I can’t just give someone three milligrams per kilo of amphotericin and expect them to live.” Bonnie took a sip of her coffee. It was precisely as she liked it.
“Was that how you killed the last zombie?”
“Yes. The infection subsided a little, but he – it – it died after the second dose. I don’t expect any cure for these people, Marcy, they’re too far gone that even if I could kill the fungus, they’d have little actual brain left. But I just hoped… that maybe we could stop the early stages, you know? Prevent it, at least.”
Marceline nodded, eyes still roaming curiously over her experiments. She stopped by the last agar recipient. “Have you… have you figured out what is wrong with me?”
Her heart clenched. “In a way. It’s anti-ergosterol antibodies combined with a slightly mutated sterol esterase.”
“What?”
Bonnie finished her drink and put the glass down, right next to the experiments. She considered moving it, but then told herself that great advances in medicine had happened because scientists ate inside their labs. “Our cell membrane and the fungus’ are similar enough that any sort of immune response or drug harms both of us. But yours is mutated, just a little. Just enough that your body can build up a response against the fungus without it being suicide.”
“Oh.”
“It’s fascinating, but I don’t think it’s replicable, save for with gene therapy. And I just don’t have the structure for that kind of experiment. So back to anti-fungals it is.”
“Figures,” Marceline scowled. “That I’d have a cure but it’s only for myself. Even my body is selfish.”
“Marcy –”
“No. Don’t even try. This –” she pointed to the plaque. “This right here is the reason why you and Finn and Jake can’t live in a safe place with other people. Because you must keep my secret. And it turns out I can’t even use that secret to help people. That’s so fucking typical –”
“Marceline.” Bonnie took closed the distance between them, held her face and kissed her. She tasted salty tears on her lips. “Shush. I love you. And you know I like this better than any of the places we’ve lived in.”
“Because you get to boss everyone around?”
“Exactly.” She smiled against her lips and kissed her again. “You know how I like giving orders. I couldn’t possibly live under the military.”
“And you’re not just saying that to make me feel better?”
“Don’t flatter yourself.” Bonnie ran her fingers through the length of Marceline’s hair. Of all the little luxuries they could afford, shampoo and hot water were fortunately among them. She moved her lips to Marceline’s neck, kissing over the scar of the first of several bites she’d taken from the zombies. “I was bossy long before you came along.”
Marceline pressed her nose to Bonnie’s scalp, running thumbs over her jaw. “And stubborn. It’s long past bedtime, you know. You need sleep.”
As if to prove her point, the lights flickered. Though the summer sun was more than enough to keep the power on during the day, they still had trouble saving that power for the night. She and Rainy were still working on better batteries and alternate sources of energy for winter.
“Mmh.” She bumped her head on Marceline’s shoulder. “But you just gave me coffee. I can’t sleep now.”
“We both know you’re as immune to coffee as I am to zombification.” Marceline snuck a hand under her chin, tilted it up and planted a kiss on her lips. “Now come. I can’t keep your side of the bed warm forever.”
Bonnie sighed, but relented. She turned the lights off, closed the door behind them and followed Marceline to bed.
“It’s adventure time!” Finn jumped on the back of the pickup truck, far too excited for someone about to face literal death. “I call shotgun!”
By shotgun he meant, of course, the literal shotgun stashed on the back of the car, which he happily loaded, then swung over his shoulder. Marceline remembered how long his hair used to grow, back when the world was still normal and they were just classmates on the Basic Spanish class the both of them took because they needed credits. The difference being, of course, that Marceline was already fluent in Spanish, while Finn honest to god didn’t know any words above hola.
But those were simpler times. Now Finn and Jake both shaved their heads before going on a supply run, because they knew they couldn’t risk being grabbed by the hair. Marceline knew it was the sensible thing to do, but there were certain things which she couldn’t give up, lest she lose her sanity, and the right to style her hair as she saw fit was among them.
“You always get the shotgun!” Jake protested, ruffling under the canvas for a rifle. “I want the katana this time.”
They had exactly one katana, and the brothers argued over it every single time.
“No way. You had the katana last time!”
“I’ll trade the katana for the shotgun.” Jake pulled the sword out of their weapon stash, touching the edge, satisfied when he saw it was still sharp.
“You know I’m bad at aiming! The person who aims bad should keep the shotgun!”
Marceline tuned their bickering out and turned to Bonnie. She had that face to her, the face she always wore when she was about to send them out. It seemed impassive, cold, perhaps even impatient, but Marceline knew better. “Hey, stranger.”
Bonnie managed a tense smile at her. Marceline closed the distance between them and planted a kiss on her lips. “Don’t give me that face. We’ve done this a thousand times before. We’ll be fine.”
Bonnie set her jaw and looked away. “This is always so stressful. I want to go with you, but…” She shrugged. “You know.”
Marceline knew. Bonnie could handle a gun just fine, but those excursions were ones in which the less people were present, the better. And they needed Bonnie and Rainy in the labs more than they needed them out there. “Yeah. Don’t worry. Just make sure you and Rain fix the playstation. I got the TV to work already, it’s the least you can do.”
Bonnie smiled. She wasn’t an engineer, just like Rain wasn’t a physician, but the two ended up sharing much of their work. Marceline suspected that was out of their mutual need for company more than anything. “No promises. I’ll move it up on the list of priorities, though. We’re still working on the microwave.”
“You’d better. Anything you want me to keep an eye for, other than a brand new zombie?”
“The usual. See if you can find any computers, phones, electronic devices we can scavenge for parts. Rain and I are trying to build a decent battery system. And be careful with other scavengers. They can be worse than zombies.”
“Yes, ma’am. Anything else?”
“More guns are always good, but the boys never leave one of those behind.” She made eye contact then, and her expression changed for a split second, from the mask of indifference to a much more vulnerable concern. “Be careful, Marcy. Get back to me in one piece.”
“I will,” She smiled and held Bonnie’s hand. “And you keep working on your cure. I know you’ll get there.”
Bonnie’s smile was discreet, but it still made her heart flutter. “Who knows. I have a promising lead with potassium iodide, gentian violet and voriconazole. Maybe it’ll work this time.”
“Whatever you say, nerd,” She leaned in. “Now give me my goodbye kiss.”
“Say please.” Her eyes twinkled when she said it.
“Please, oh princess scientist overlord, grant me the bliss of your affection.”
Bonnie laughed, a wonderful sound that made everything worth it. And then she kissed Marceline’s lips, fierce and demanding. “I mean it. If you die on me, I’ll kill you.”
That doesn’t even make sense, she mused, and then Bonnie kissed her again, and all rational thought escaped her head.
It was one long drive from the rural campus to the nearest populated area – at least forty minutes on the road, in which Marceline was forced to listen to Finn and Jake’s endless repertoire of puns. They usually only took the pickup truck, but every once in a while, Bonnie needed a new zombie capture so she could test her things on it, and so they also took the police car, which they’d reinforced for that purpose.
It was also useful for whenever they lucked out and found stray farm animals, and they’d learned to prioritize the animals over the zombie captures since zombies were plenty and food was scarce. She was driving one car and Jake was driving the other, a walkie-talkie on each so they could communicate.
“Why did the zombie eat the archer?” Jake chirped, static behind his voice.
“I don’t know,” Finn vibrated on the seat next to her. “Why did he?”
“He wanted his bone and marrow!”
Marceline seriously considered, for the umpteenth time, the possibility of tossing Finn and the walkie-talkie through the window. She settled with a groan of distaste.
On her side, Finn giggled. “Oh, I got one. How does a zombie serve his country?”
“I don’t know. How does he?”
“In the Marine Corpse!!”
Oh my god, she thought, and the boys burst out laughing again. “Puta mierda, Finn. You make me wish I wasn’t immune to the fungus.”
This had the two laughing harder, and Marceline couldn’t help but smile with them. “Okay, idiots, we’re here. You know the drill. Get in. Grab anything of interest for our respective brainiacs –” she stopped, looked at Finn, “ – and Finn’s forest girl.”
He blushed, much to Marceline’s delight. It wasn’t always that they took a new person into the community, considering just how dangerous people were, but Finn had a gift for finding good folk in the wilderness. He cleared his throat. “Yes. We grab Bonnie’s zombie on the way back?”
They always did, because it was far too inconvenient to carry a loud, aggressive zombie on their car while they raided for supplies. “Correct, Finnster. As always. Keep your guns at ready but avoid shooting them, et cetera. And wear your masks, non-immune plebs. Let’s go.”
They avoided going too far from one another, but spread apart for efficiency. Marceline kicked the door of a mostly intact drugstore open, gun in one hand and machete on the other. She went straight to the antibiotics aisle, tossing as many boxes as she could into a backpack. Bonnie had instructed her on what drugs to prioritize, and when she was done cleaning the shelves, she moved on to the painkillers and opioids.
They’d done hospital raids before and Bonnie had plenty equipment stored and ready at the campus, but she went through them a lot in her research and was always in need of restocking. Marceline moved to the next alley and tensed when she heard a groan. Holding her breath, she moved so that her back was to the wall and carefully peeked around the corner.
A couple zombies huddled in a corner there, their groans still human enough that she could tell they were Runners. It didn’t take much for her to understand what had happened: the scattered drugs on the floor, the still-open bag, the rotten pieces of staircase fallen on the ground.
Those had been scavengers, just like her, who were probably surprised by spores hidden in the walls. It was unusual for the fungus to spread like that, in places so close to the surface where light could reach.
Stupid, she thought, carefully sliding her machete into her belt and adjusting the silencer on her pistol. Stupid of them not to wear masks.
She took careful aim and pulled the trigger twice, then twice more. The zombies’ heads exploded into a mess of blood, brains and spores that made her stomach turn. Without thinking too much about it, she ran up to where they were, grabbed the bag and jogged back to the pickup, tossing the things on the back.
Finn and Jake still hadn’t returned, and a twinge of worry squeezed in her chest. The brothers got distracted easy, and more often than not they were chasing something that would prove invaluable for them in the future, but going anywhere with them was still a source of endless stress.
“Puta,” she muttered under her breath, making her way to the building she’d seen the two enter. “I’m going to kill those two. I swear to god. Pendejos.”
She knew something was wrong when she heard the screams. And then Jake was there, dragging a bleeding Finn behind him, followed by what had to be a dozen zombies. Marceline didn’t hesitate. She took aim and fired several times without stopping. A few of the zombies fell down, but more immediately took their places.
By then, Jake had already reached her, and she slung one of Finn’s arms over her shoulder and helped the two back into the car.
“Drive, drive, drive!” she shouted at Jake, slamming the pickup door shut as he ran to the police car.
When the zombies reached her, she had already started the engine, and she slammed her foot in the speed pedal. The tires screamed and she was flung forward when she slammed a zombie with the roof of the car. She didn’t let go of the wheel, driving away as fast as she could.
Finn was pale next to her, barely conscious, his arm bleeding. From the corner of her eyes, she could see the distinctive shape of teeth on his skin.
Fuck.
“Marcy,” he muttered, and he was sweating and crying. He opened the window, put his head outside and threw up, fingers shaking. “Marcy. It’s over for me, it’s over, I’m bit, Marcy you can’t let me turn, please –”
“Shut it,” she hissed. “It’s not over. We’ll find a way.”
“Marcy, please. You know that’s just not true. You know what happens now. I don’t – I can’t –”
“Shut up!” she snarled. A familiar broken farm showed up on the horizon and she knew they were into walkie-talkie range. She switched to the appropriate channel and pressed the button. “Bonnie, you hear me? We have an emergency. Over.”
A couple seconds later, the walkie-talkie crackled. “Marceline, I’m here. What happened? Over.”
She grit her teeth. “Finn’s bit. Right arm, just above the wrist. Over.”
It took Bonnie almost a full minute to reply. “Understood. Preparing to receive him. Over and out.”
“Propofol,” Bonnie commanded, and Rain pushed the milky liquid into Finn’s veins. She looked at the heart monitor, saw the expected drop in the heart rate. Next to her, Phoebe squeezed the ambu bag, inflating his lungs. “Slower, Phoebe.” She turned to Rain. “Fentanyl.”
This time, the liquid was clear like water. Bonnie prepared the laryngoscope and moved to stand behind Finn’s head. “Now rocuronium.”
She watched Rain do the injection and counted to sixty, then back to one. “Okay, move,” she grabbed the laryngoscope with her left hand. Phoebe paused her work, and Finn stopped breathing. She pushed the metal into his mouth, shoved his tongue aside, lifting his head so that she could look deep into his throat and see his vocal chords.
Thank fuck, she thought, grabbing the tube and sliding it into Finn’s trachea, because she’d done that maybe ten times in her whole life. A moment later, the ventilator whirred into work, and she saw his lungs resume moving. She checked his oxygen saturation on the monitor – still above 90% - and his heartbeat – still above 50 – and finally allowed herself a deep, shaky breath.
“Okay,” she pulled off her gloves, tossed them in the trash bin and grabbed a new set of sterile ones. Her hands were shaking. “Okay, okay.”
She took a moment to inspect the wound on his arm and winced. It was deep and ugly. The tendons of the brachioradialis and flexor carpi radialis had been bitten clean off, together with a chunk of muscle. He was lucky in that the radial artery hadn’t been involved, missed by millimeters. She was going to have to amputate, there was no question about it – amputate, and hope they had been fast enough.
She had scalpels and a cautery and even a bone saw of the non-electric sort, all fruits of the multiple hospital raids she had gone in. Bonnie had prepared for a moment like this, but she wasn’t ready to do it. She wasn’t a goddamned surgeon, or a goddamned infectious diseases doctor. She had specialized in endocrinology. Her realm were thrice-cursed hormones.
She’d studied those procedures when the apocalypse happened, of course. Bonnibel had her bases covered, and she knew this day might come. But it was one thing to read it in books. Another to perform it, with an engineer and a rapper as her assistants.
“Okay,” she repeated, more to herself than to the others. “Okay, let’s do this.” She lifted her head, looked at Rain and Phoebe. “Scalpel,” she extended her hand.
Phoebe passed her the scalpel, and Bonnibel began cutting.
Bonnie was still in her bloodied scrubs when Marceline walked into the room. She made for a pathetic figure, sitting on the corner, counting her breathing, hair loose from her cap.
At least I had the energy to remove the gloves, she thought, gratefully accepting when Marceline offered a hand to help her up. “I – fuck. I did my best, Marcy. I did my best and it’ll be a miracle if he lives and I –”
“Shh.” Marceline touched her index finger to Bonnie’s lips. There were deep rings under her eyes. “I know, Bon. Let’s get you to a shower.”
She would like to say she stayed up the whole night to check on Finn, but the reality was that she fell asleep as soon as she hit the sofa next to his bed. She woke up the next morning with the angry beeping of his monitors and felt her heart leap from her chest in panic –
And then relief. Finn was awake, if groggy, and he was groaning and angrily tugging at the straps they’d used to tie him on the bed. But his eyes lacked the orange glow of newly turned Runners and his face was scrunched up in a very Finn-like expression of utter indignation. “Hey, princess,” he muttered. “I can excuse cutting off my arm, but don’t you think tying me up to the bed is a bit much?”
She burst out laughing and crying at the same time, wrapping her arms tightly around his much larger frame and dampening his shirt with her tears. It was uncharacteristic of her to show this much emotion, she knew, but right then she was exhausted and she did not care. “You’re a fucking idiot, Finn.”
“Can I raise my arm to agree?” He smiled, goofy as always. “Or, well, raise it to ask questions. I have a few. The most pressing one being, am I still infected?”
Bonnie pulled back and undid the straps on his torso, then on his arms, a twinge of dread on her chest. “I – I don’t know, Finn. I amputated it as fast as I could, and I – I’ve given you some drugs.” She nodded towards the EV fluid bag hooked up to his arm. “Voriconazole, piperacillin, tazobactam, potassium iodide. Your stump is dipped into gentian violet. I’m going to give you a dose of Amphotericin soon. The only reason I haven’t yet is because it might kill you to have too many of those at once.”
“Mathematical. So you basically stuffed me with everything you could get your hands on?”
“As much as I thought you kidneys could handle, yeah.” She tucked her hair behind her ear. “I’m sorry, Finn.”
“When… when will I know?”
Bonnie pinched the bridge of her nose. “Usually you’d show symptoms within twenty-four hours, but the antifungals might delay that. I’d say… two days from now, if you still aren’t sick, then you’re good to go.”
He stared at the ceiling for a second, and Bonnie could see the glistening of tears on the corners of his eyes. “One last question, Bon.”
“Yes?”
“Did you fix the damn playstation? I kept telling Jake and Marcy that I could beat them on Crash Team Racing with only one hand. Guess now is the time to prove it.”
Bonnie would say the second day of waiting was the worse one. On the first day she gave Finn his medication right after lunch, one milligram per kilo, pushing it as far as she possibly could without the proper blood tests. The classical ‘shake and bake’ came little over than an hour later, the whole package, complete with fever and chills and puking his guts out.
But on the second day, all they did was wait. Wait and count the hours and, she supposed, fix the playstation.
On the third day, Bonnie allowed herself to be cautiously optimistic.
On the fourth day, there was a distinct shift in everyone’s mood. Bonnie was still skeptical, but the seeds of hope were starting to sprout.
On the fifth day, Rainy started projecting a prosthetic arm for Finn.
And after a week had passed, not even Bonnie couldn’t stop the smile on her face every time she saw Finn walk between the surgery room and the kitchen, couldn’t help but laugh at his stupid jokes.
After two weeks, she suspended the antibiotics and the antifungals. She didn’t sleep that night, terrified that the infection would show up in full force in the morning. But it didn’t. And after a month had passed and Finn was back to playing soccer and running around the campus, she could no longer stop herself from accepting it: that her improvised combo of drugs and even more improvised surgery had been a success.
She was leaning against the window frame and watching him help Jake with the chickens when she heard the door open and Marceline walk in. She moved to Bonnie’s side without speaking, peeking over her shoulder to see what Bonnie was staring at.
“You’re a genius, you know,” Marceline commented, snorting when a chicken beat its wings and pecked a crouching Finn on the nose. “You did it. You stopped the Cordyceps. You’re a fucking genius, Bon.”
She sighed. “Hardly. I don’t know what did it. Could have been the amputation, or the drugs, or all of them. And Finn was a healthy and young man. Not everyone would survive a treatment that aggressive. It’s not as if I found a cure –”
“Blah, blah, blah.” Marceline half smiled at her. “Right, Brainiac. I don’t care. What I care is that my friend is right there, alive and well. And that’s thanks to you.”
“Hardly,” she insisted. “You were the one who brought him back, and Phoebe and Rain helped on the surgery, and honestly, without your blood samples I would never even know what medications to try –”
“Dear god, can’t you take a compliment?”
“I shouldn’t,” Bonnie grinned. “My ego is large enough without adding ‘savior of humanity’ to it.”
“Can’t argue against that,” Marceline laughed, and looped an arm around her waist. “What are you going to do with your findings?”
Bonnie considered it. “Nothing, for now. There’s a lot I need to study still. Perfect my drug mixture at least. It’s hard to work when all I have are in-vitro models, ants and actual zombies, but I’ll make do. Once it’s ready, though, well. I might share it with the world.”
“Might?”
Bonnie shrugged. “You know how people are. They might just storm the place thinking I hold some magic cure when in reality I have, I don’t know, something with maybe twenty per cent efficacy in preventing new cases when applied within twenty-four hours of contact.”
“That’s awfully specific.”
“Of course. That’s how science should be. Anything else is suspicious to say the least.” She shook her head and leaned back against Marceline’s warmth. “I don’t think I’d risk it. I wouldn’t risk… this. You. I’d risk you even less, if I could.”
“We’ve been doing less and less supply runs, anyway. We used to need them every other week. Nowadays you barely send us once a semester. I’m starting to feel cooped up already.”
Bonnie smiled. “We’re very close to self-sufficiency, and far enough from civilization to go mostly unbothered. Soon enough we’ll only need those runs for, I don’t know. Fancy hair spray.” She elbowed Marceline on the ribs. “For the princesses among us.”
“If this thing is a monarchy, I’m at least a queen,” Marceline poked her back, then wrapped an arm around her shoulder and planted a kiss on her neck. “I love you, Bon. That’s the one good thing out of the apocalypse, eh? I would never have grown the balls to approach you if not to save you from a zombie.”
“Excuse me,” Bonnie turned to her, bumping her nose against Marceline’s jaw. “If I recall correctly, it was you with a twisted ankle running from a hundred clickers, and me in a car going your way.”
“Details, details,” Marceline dipped her head for a kiss.
Bonnie obliged, smiling when their lips met. “I love you, too. I –”
There was a crash and the two broke apart, looking down the window to see Finn with one foot stuck on a bucket, kicking, grain spilled all over his clothes while Jake desperately tried to pull the chickens away from him.
Bonnie and Marceline stared at each other for a full second without blinking.
And then they burst out laughing.