Chapter Text
prologue: all the fear and the fire of the end of the world
Rule number one: Don’t stop moving
By the time the zombie apocalypse arrives in Millport, he is ready. There’d already been whispers of it and the trickles of the aftermath seeping into the Arizona town. Reports of a new disease sweeping through cities globally. Aggressive attacks across the country. The shutdown of the news stations.
When the first person turns, he makes himself scarce. Rule number 2: Be invisible. Live invisible.
He shuts himself in the house he was squatting in for a week and that’s all it takes. Really, Millport didn’t stand a chance. Half the town already had one foot in the grave. The other half just didn’t have the experience he did. The skills.
By the time things quieted down and he stuck his head out, there were only a few zombies left. He shot them down — just in case. Leave no trace, and all that shit.
He stuck around for a little while. Supplies were good with no competition. Fruit left ripe in the grocery stores. Kitchens full of meats and cheeses abandoned. Fresh water he collected in bathtubs and buckets like he learned to do for hurricanes, once upon a time.
He could survive like this, out in the desert. Finally at peace.
But the bodies start to unnerve him. Their opened eyes watching him around the bullets someone (maybe him) put in their skulls. He can’t bring himself to close them. He was never one for funeral rights.
Really, the worst part is not knowing. He picked Millport because of its isolation and that trait helped it bury itself into the ground with little interference on his part. But now that isolation is doing more harm than good. For all he could’ve known, he could be the last person left alive.
For three months, he watches the skyline from the roof of Millport High School. He waits for someone to approach. Someone to bring news of the outside world. For someone to come for him, for better or for worse. Every bird on the horizon or straw cactus alerts his hyperactive senses.
To distract himself, he plays. His mother never allowed him to play when he was alive. She’d probably break his right hand if she saw him carrying around an exy racket as anything other than a weapon. Thankfully, she hadn’t lived long enough to meet the apocalypse and what it turned her son into.
He needs something to do other than panic. Other than watch the vultures pick apart his neighbors or recount his bullets.
He tosses pitch after pitch at the empty goal in the center of the Millport High School court until his arms ache. Until his survival instincts take over. Until the food in the supermarkets start to turn. Until he realizes he’s the last one in Millport left, and no one is coming for him.
No one except…
Rule number one: Don’t stop moving.
In the light of a beautiful Millport sunrise, he leaves Arizona behind him and heads east, a borrowed Millport exy racket tucked over his shoulder.
Rule number three: Don’t tell anyone who you are.
His rules predate the apocalypse, instated by his mother when she took him and ran. But they’re useful, even after the world went to shit. Even after his mother died.
When he arrived in Millport, he brandished his latest name — Neil Josten. But he didn’t really need it. He wasn’t there long enough to establish himself as Neil before the first outbreak.
As he leaves Millport, he discovers the outside world is learning his ways.
Outside of Phoenix, he hitches a ride with a trucker shuttling supplies out of the state. The city itself had long gone to shit. Fallen first to the zombies, then to the cops, then to the vigilantes, then the gangs. For guns and ammo, the driver got other essentials he could trade with other cities. He made himself useful.
The trucker introduces himself as Phoenix. “And not like the actor,” he says, like that clarifies anything for him. “Like the city herself.”
Phoenix tells him that its a system the remainders like them are using. “No need for names anymore. Besides, it’s better that way. Our old selves died with the others.”
So he becomes Millport. Just another disguise tucked alongside the others. As the truck kicks up dust, he hopes it will be the last one.
Rule number four: Make no friends.
Millport is used to a solitary life, a life without attachments. But he is less accustomed to the loneliness that comes without his mother. He isn’t used to relying so heavily on others.
The American west is vast — one giant farmland with borders that no longer matter. Cities are scarce and few between. Phoenix isn’t the last trucker he’s had to employ. He barters anything he can get his hands on. Food. Water. Ammo, if he’s really desperate. Anything but his racket.
He raids anywhere he comes across, searching the selves for valuables he can use to trade later. For a box of tampons, a woman takes him all the way to the Texas border.
For his time, he exchanges information. Without names, it's easy to track where people are from. Albuquerque. LA. Dallas. Austin. Kansas City. They tell him about home. The conditions east, if they can. If they want. He learns to stay away from cities from Nashville. Too many looters. Too much paranoia. Stick to the highways. Stick to the gas stations. Stick to the suburbs.
A girl from New Orleans tells him to try universities.
“More chill than the cities,” she reassures him. “Less open than the suburbs. Just people trying to survive.” Then, she sets her head on his shoulder, and shuts her eyes. He’s gone before dawn.
When he stops next, he follows the signs to the closest university. Breckenridge is a stout school, but everything New Orleans promised. Just close enough to Dallas that food is less limited, but far enough that the gunshots in the city kinda just sound like thunder. There’s open bunks, clothes to rifle through.
The best part — a D1 exy court. Millport would’ve easily traded every last bullet he had for just a glimpse of this place. When he asks San Antonio if he can use it, she clears him with nothing more than a weird look. The other survivors wouldn’t even think of playing a team sport alone. But when the ball they gift him rebounds on the plexiglass, alongside his heartbeat, Millport feels less alone.
From there, Millport school hops. He works his way through along the Gulf and up the East Coast, hitting every major school he can. If he were a normal kid, if there were no zombies to worry about, he might have done this with his mom. She might’ve patted him on the back and led him through the campuses, telling him to imagine himself living there.
Now, he just hopes they have somewhere he can play before dipping. Rule number one: Don’t stop moving .
Maybe that’s where he goes wrong. Maybe that’s how he ends up on Palmetto’s surprisingly empty campus, an exy racket slamming into his stomach.