Chapter Text
If you are reading this guide in the hopes that it will provide you with cheerful anecdotes about triumph over adversity, inspiring tales of human resilience, or even a single reassuring conclusion about how everything will turn out fine in the end, I must inform you that you have made a terrible mistake.
This is a story about death.
More specifically, it is a story about Gotham City after death decided to stop being a permanent condition.
Gotham had always been a terrible place to live. Before the outbreak, its primary industries were corruption, crime, and a peculiar brand of architectural gothic excess that suggested the city planners had been reading too much Poe and not enough building code.
Still, it had been alive.
Now, four months after the first infection, Gotham was a monument to silence.
The kind of silence that presses against your eardrums like wet cotton. The kind that makes you forget what traffic sounded like, or the subway's rattle, or the simple background hum of a city filled with living, breathing, complaining people. This new silence was interrupted only by three sounds: the wind whistling through shattered windows, the distant groan of the infected, and, if you were particularly unlucky, your own heartbeat, which had a terrible habit of sounding far too loud when you were trying not to be noticed.
Dr. Harleen Quinzel had become intimately familiar with all three.
She moved through the remains of what had once been Robinson Park with the practiced quiet of someone who had learned that noise meant death. Her baseball bat, a Louisville Slugger she'd liberated from a sporting goods store, rested against her shoulder.
"Oh look. Harls! We’ve got movement. Prepare the doilies, we have guests!"
The voice came from slightly behind her, carrying that particular theatrical drawl that made even warnings sound like the setup to a joke. Jack Napier had that kind of voice, the kind that belonged in a jazz club or a radio drama, not shambling through the corpse of civilization. He'd kept his purple suit jacket, though it had seen better days, and he carried his tommy gun, a genuine 1928 Thompson he'd acquired through means he'd described as "theatrical redistribution".
Before the outbreak, Jack had been a comedian. Not a particularly successful one, but successful enough to have opinions about the local comedy scene and a small apartment in the Gotham Bowery. Harleen had met him at a community theater production where she'd been volunteering as a mental health consultant and he'd been playing a gangster with entirely too much enthusiasm.
That had been four months ago.
Harleen followed his gesture and spotted them, figures moving between the twisted remains of park benches and dead trees. Human-shaped. Human-moving. The shuffle-walk of the infected had a particular quality to it, like watching a puppet operated by someone who'd only seen humans from a distance.
But these weren't shuffling.
"Livin' breathin' people, Puddin’." Harleen breathed, and hated how much hope she could hear in her own voice.
Jack moved up beside her, squinting at the haze of afternoon light filtered through smoke that perpetually hung over Gotham now. Something was always burning. "Perhaps! Or perhaps it’s all a terrible trap and the dead are starting to get some brains!”
"But– That ain’t possible!"
"The dead getting up and taking a walk wasn’t possible either, and yet, voila! I must say, this is the worst camping trip I have ever been on!" He cackled to himself.
Harleen counted silently. Three figures. Moving with purpose, checking corners, definitely alive. Other survivors. It had been six weeks since they'd encountered anyone who wasn't either dead or actively trying to eat them. Six weeks of isolation, of rationed supplies, of sleeping in shifts and trusting no one but each other.
"Could we make contact? We need ta group, Mistah J." Harleen said.
Jack's eyebrows rose. "Harley, Harley, Harley! Take the lead, my dear! If you come stumbling back with no head and a lust for brains, I’ll know that it’s time to run!"
"These are different."
"You can tell that from a hundred yards away? I envy your eyesight!"
"Call it professional intuition, wise guy." Harleen adjusted her grip on the bat. "We need allies. Eventually, our luck runs out. Law of averages an' all that."
There was a pause. "Well, when you put it like that, how can I refuse? But we approach carefully, and at the first sign of ritual sacrifice, we make like a banana and split. Agree?"
"Agreed."
They began moving forward, keeping low, using the scattered debris as cover. Harleen's psychology training had covered crisis response, trauma, and therapeutic intervention. It had not, she reflected bitterly, covered tactical urban navigation through zombie-infested wasteland. That was more of an on-the-job learning situation.
The survivors ahead were clearer now. Three of them, definitely. Three men. They were rifling through an overturned delivery truck, probably looking for supplies. One of them, tall, wearing what looked like a blue regal cloak, stood watch while the others searched periodically checking his pocket watch.
Harleen was about to call out when Jack's hand clamped over her wrist.
She heard it a half-second later.
The groan.
Not one groan. Multiple groans, creating a dissonant chorus that made her skin crawl and her stomach clench. The infected had a way of vocalizing that wasn't quite human, something in the vocal cords degrading, or the brain forgetting how to use them properly, or perhaps just the sound of hunger given voice.
They came from everywhere.
The infected poured from storefronts and alleys. Dozens of them. More. Their skin had the gray-green pallor of meat left too long in the sun, some still wearing the remnants of their former lives, business suits, coffee shop uniforms, evening wear from a party they'd never left. Their eyes were the worst part. Filmed over, milky, but still tracking. Still seeing.
Still hungry.
The survivors ahead scattered. The cloaked one went down immediately, overwhelmed. The others ran in different directions, the one with the large machine gun ran left and the one with the bright blue hat ran right, and just like that, they were gone.
"Aaand there go our new friends. Well, it was nice almost meeting them. I'm sure they were lovely people with hopes and dreams and, oh look, they're going to be eaten. That's unfortunate." Jack said.
"We need ta blow, Mistah J."
But the infected had noticed them too.
The horde split, a dozen breaking off and lurching toward them with that terrible, relentless speed that the infected could manage when they'd spotted food.
"Run or fight?" Harleen asked, already knowing the answer. They were boxed in, debris behind them, infected ahead and to the sides.
"Fight. And for the record, I'd like to note that I was right about this being a terrible idea.”
"Noted, ya mook."
Harleen stepped forward and swung.
The bat connected with the first zombie's skull with a sound like a watermelon hitting pavement. The physics of it never got easier, the resistance, the give, the wet crack. But she'd learned to dissociate from it. This wasn't a person anymore. This was a threat.
The zombie dropped.
Behind her, Jack's tommy gun roared to life. "And the orchestra begins!" he announced over the gunfire. The sound was deafening in the empty street, brass casings pinged against concrete. The infected coming from his side jerked and fell, bodies torn apart by .45 caliber rounds at close range. "Ladies and gentlemen, for my next number, a little diddy I like to call 'Swiss Cheese Serenade!'"
They'd developed a rhythm over the past months. Harleen handled close combat, keeping the infected from overwhelming them. Jack provided covering fire, dropping the ones too far away for her bat. It wasn't elegant, but it worked.
She spun, bat already moving in a wide arc that caught another zombie in the temple. "The left side's gettin' crowded!"
"I see them! Don't worry, Harls, Mister J's got the solution!" Bullets tore through the approaching infected. "The solution is bullets, in case that wasn't clear. Lots and lots of bullets."
Harleen stepped back, used the momentum to drive the end of the bat into a third one's throat, crushing the windpipe. Not that they needed to breathe, but it made them fall down, and falling down was good enough. "Less talkin', more shootin'!"
"I can multitask! It's a gift, really. Some people can pat their head and rub their belly. I can make jokes and commit violence. We all have our talents."
Three more infected came at her close together. She went low, sweeping the bat at knee level. Infected didn't have good balance. Damage the legs and they toppled. She crushed the skulls of all three while they were down, grunting with the effort.
The tommy gun continued its staccato rhythm. Jack was good with it, she'd give him that. Controlled bursts. Making the ammunition count. They'd found a cache of .45 ACP rounds two weeks ago, but bullets weren't infinite.
Nothing was infinite anymore except the dead.
Harleen lost count after the seventh kill. There was only the next threat, the next swing, the next wet crunch. Blood spattered her face. Something that might have been part of a finger stuck to her jacket. She kept moving, because stopping meant dying.
Her arms burned. The bat was slick in her hands. A zombie grabbed at her from the side, she hadn't seen it, mistake, stupid mistake, and she barely managed to jerk away, its fingers closing on air instead of her sleeve.
Jack shot it before it could lunge again.
"Thanks, Puddin'!" she gasped.
"Don't mention it. Just add it to my tab. I'm keeping score. So far I'm winning."
"This ain't a competition!"
"Everything's a competition if you have the right attitude!"
That's when she heard it.
Click.
Click-click-click.
The sound of the tommy gun's firing mechanism cycling, but no shots. The sound of empty. The sound of jam.
Harleen's head snapped around. Jack was staring at the gun with theatrical dismay. "Well. This is awkward."
"Mistah J—"
"I know, I know!" He pulled back the bolt, trying to clear it. Nothing. "Come on, baby, don't do this to me now. We had a good thing going!" He tried again, shaking it like that might help. "'So a comedian and his gun walk into an apocalypse...'"
Still nothing.
But the infected didn't care about mechanical failures or the narrative timing of dramatic irony.
Three of them had been approaching from Jack's side, and without the suppressing fire, they closed the distance. Fast. Faster than Harleen could reach him, there were two between them, and she'd have to go through both to get there, and there wasn't time, there wasn't enough time..
"Oh, this is gonna hurt," Jack observed, almost cheerfully, and swung the gun like a club.
The Tommy gun was heavy enough and Jack was strong enough that the first zombie went down hard, skull caved in. But he was off-balance now, and there were two more, and..
"Now, now, fellas, there's no need to get bitey about—OW! Okay, that's just rude!"
The second zombie grabbed the gun barrel, yanking Jack off balance. The third…
The third one bit down on Jack's shoulder.
And Jack screamed.
It wasn't a joke this time. Wasn't theatrical. It was raw and shocked and real in a way that made something in Harleen's chest seize up.
"MISTAH J!"
She was moving before she'd consciously decided to move. The bat swung in wide, brutal arcs. The two infected between them went down. She didn't make sure they stayed down, didn't have time, just kept moving toward Jack, toward that scream, toward—
He was on the ground now. All three zombies were on him, tearing, biting, pulling. His suit jacket, that stupid purple suit jacket he'd refused to abandon, was coming apart in strips. His blood looked very red against the gray pavement. Too red. Too much.
Harleen's first swing took the head off the zombie on his left. Completely off. It rolled away with a wet sound and she didn't watch where it went.
Second swing crushed the skull of the one biting his arm.
Third swing. Fourth. Fifth.
She didn't stop swinging until the zombies on Jack became bodies. Became pulp. Became things that would never move again.
But it was too late.
It had been too late from the moment the first one bit down.
Jack was still alive. Still conscious. His eyes found hers, and even now, even now, there was something almost amused in them. Like he'd just heard the punchline to a joke he hadn't expected.
"Harley..." His voice was wet. Bubbling. He coughed, and blood came with it.
"Don't you dare," Harleen said, dropping to her knees beside him. Her voice sounded strange. Distant. Like someone else was using it. "Don't you dare check out on me, Puddin’. Ya hear me? We have a system. We got a thing."
"Yeah, well..." He coughed again. Tried to smile. Actually managed it, somehow. "Guess I'm... breaking... our first rule together. Don't die. Remember?" Another wet laugh that turned into a cough. "Turns out... I'm not very good... at following rules. Who knew?"
"Stop talkin' like that!" Her hands were on him, trying to stop the bleeding, but there was too much. Too many wounds. The human body wasn't meant to survive this. "We'll fix this. We'll—I'll patch ya up, we'll find supplies, we'll—"
"Harls." His hand found hers and squeezed weakly. "Hey. Look at me."
She looked.
"You gotta... keep going. No banana splits. No... zombies. Just... keep that bat swinging and..." He coughed, and this time he couldn't stop. When he could speak again, his voice was barely a whisper. "This is... terrible timing... but I just thought of... the perfect joke about... getting bitten... and I can't... quite remember... how it goes..."
His eyes were starting to glaze. That same milky film she'd seen on a thousand infected.
"Mistah J, please—"
"The punchline was... probably terrible anyway. I'm... workshopping it... in the afterlife... Come back with... the revised version..."
His hand went slack in hers.
"Puddin'?"
No answer.
"Puddin', come on. This ain't funny."
Still no answer.
"MISTAH J!"
The only sound was her own voice echoing off dead buildings, and the distant groan of more infected, and the wind through broken windows.
Harleen knelt there in the blood and the gore and the absolute silence that rushed in after violence, holding the hand of a dead comedian in the middle of a dead city, and felt something inside her crack.
Not break. Breaking would have been cleaner.
This was a crack. A fracture. The kind that spreads.
She became aware, distantly, that there were still infected around. The ones she'd downed but not killed were stirring. She was also distantly aware they could all hear her screaming.
She should move.
Should run.
Should do a lot of things that a smart person with a psychology degree and survival instincts would do.
Instead, she stood. Picked up her bat. And turned toward the approaching infected with something cold and terrible settling into her bones.
"Awright," she said quietly, to the infected, to the city, to God or the universe or whatever cosmic joke had decided to make the dead walk. Her accent had never sounded thicker, each word clipped and hard. "Ya want me? Come an' get me."
What happened next could perhaps be called rage, though that word was too small for it. Rage implied heat, passion, a bright burning thing. This was colder. Surgical. Each swing of the bat was measured. Efficient. Designed to cause maximum damage with minimum effort.
Harleen Quinzel had a PhD in psychology. She understood trauma responses. Understood that what she was doing was textbook displacement, directing grief into violence because grief was too large to feel all at once.
She didn't care.
The infected came at her and she destroyed them. One after another. The bat rose and fell. Rose and fell. Her arms stopped burning and went numb. Then stopped feeling like her arms at all. Just tools. Instruments of violence attached to a body that was very good at killing.
A zombie in a nurse's uniform, some grim irony there, lunged at her. She sidestepped, brought the bat down on its skull. Moved to the next one. A man in a business suit was missing half his face. She didn't look at the face. Just swung.
When there were no more infected standing, she kept swinging at the ones on the ground. Making sure. Making very sure. Making absolutely certain that nothing would get up again. That nothing would take anything else from her.
Finally, minutes later, hours later, time had stopped meaning much, she stopped.
The street was a charnel house. Bodies everywhere. More than she remembered fighting. Had she fought that many? Must have. The evidence was hard to dispute.
Her bat slipped from her fingers. Clattered against the pavement.
She walked back to where Jack lay.
The infected had made a mess of him. It was hard to see the person he'd been under all the damage. But his face was mostly intact. Still recognizably Jack. Still wearing that expression of faint amusement, like he'd just thought of something funny.
"I'm so sorry, Puddin'. I shoulda been faster. Shoulda—"
She couldn't finish. Couldn't find the words.
She couldn't bury him. Couldn't even move him somewhere better. The infected would come back, they always came back, and she needed to be gone before they did.
But she could take something.
She picked up the tommy gun. It was still jammed, still useless, but it had been Jack's. That meant something. Would keep meaning something even when nothing else did. She slung it over her shoulder next to her bat.
One last look.
"See ya on the other side," she whispered. "An' for the record? Ya were funny. Real funny. Best damn comedian in the whole rotten city."
Then she turned and walked away, alone, into the ruins of Gotham City.
Behind her, Jack Napier lay still and would never tell another joke.
Ahead of her, the world continued its slow, shambling end.
And somewhere in between, Harleen Quinzel learned the first and most important rule of surviving the apocalypse.
Rule #1: Don't Die
This is the first rule, and the most important rule, and the rule that everyone breaks eventually. The trick is to break it later rather than sooner. The trick is to make the world work for every single day it takes from you.
Harleen had said it over cocktails four months ago when the idea of the living dead was still something of a rumour or a joke.
Jack Napier had been dead for approximately four minutes when Harleen Quinzel learned how easy it was to break this rule.
She would not forget it again.