Chapter Text
After two years everything became quite. One year ago the birds stopped singing in the morning and the soft crackling of leaves under deer hooves followed soon after; now it was such a rare occurrence it almost seemed like a miracle that any were left. Winter had just passed and the air was slowly losing its cold bite in favor of a cool breeze. Just outside of the city- if it could even be called a city anymore- was where Mickey was staying, in a small house on the side of the road. The silence was almost deafening. There were no cars that drove along the road anymore, even if there were working cars there was no one to drive them. No gunshots could be heard either, which had become even more frequent when the virus broke out.
The Virus- the doctors called it Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy, but that was too long for any normal person to say, so everyone called it the Virus- caused the extinction of mankind, along with almost every other animal. Well, not extinction but humans were definitely on the critically endangered list. The virus created zombies, not like the ones people would see on TV and in movies, but regular people who craved raw meat and flesh. The more they held out the sicker they got, and the more they ate the stronger the need got. Either way, if someone got the virus they were fucked. People who got the virus survived on livestock and other animals to meet the need, but as more and more people got the virus, more and more animals were getting eaten. Once most of the animals were gone the infected turned to eating humans to meet their needs. Nobody really blamed them for turning cannibalistic- even people who didn't have the virus ate other people too once all the animals disappeared- but it was just enough for people to start seeing them as monsters instead of humans. When that happened was when everything fell apart.
Everyone lost someone to the virus, if someone didn't lose all of their family to it then they would lose them some other way. Only the lucky people were still traveling with their family or loved ones, or anyone for that matter. After everyone started to call the infected zombies was when all shit broke loose. It was a free-for-all and the government did nothing to stop it. That was probably because other countries had already fallen apart and they realized any effort that they could take to resist the inevitable fall of America and humanity itself was worthless.
Mickey had been traveling alone for over a year. Him and Mandy left Chicago three days before they bombed the city and found refuge at a shelter in Rockford. The shelter wasn't that big, it had just been built a few weeks before they got there and was constantly in need of repairs. There were only five beds and over a hundred people there, the ones who started the places didn't expects such a great turn out. Mickey and Mandy stayed there for a few months, until it got warm enough to start traveling again, and made their way west, hoping California was in a better state than Illinois. They traveled with a few people that Mandy had made friends with at the shelter and decided that they had the right to follow her wherever she went. Two weeks into travel Mandy fell for one of the guys, the one who suddenly decided that Washington was a better idea than California and wanted to head there instead. Mandy and the other guy that had followed them from the shelter ran off with him, leaving Mickey to travel alone and wonder if Mandy ever made it to Washington. If she was even alive. Assuming that she was alive Mandy was the only family that Mickey had left. His brothers left home years before the virus had ever became a thing and none of them contacted Mickey or Mandy to see if they were okay. Terry was in jail during the outbreak and neither Mickey or Many cared if he was okay.
Halfway to California, wandering around in the desert in some state he didn't bother to remember the name in, Mickey set up camp and stayed in an abandoned house for a few weeks until he came up with a new plan. He didn't see a point in going to California anymore, it had been Mandys idea and Mickey went along with it because he didn't have a better one. With no reason to go to California and no contact to anyone in the world he started to make his way back home. As the months dragged by Mickey started to notice that he came across less infected, and less people in general. He passed through cities that had once been filled with noise and people and instead found ransacked houses and only the sound of still falling rubble and his footsteps. The few people that he did come across where heading in the opposite direction and remained friendly. They swapped advice about which roads were best to take and which ones to avoid.
When he finally made it back to Chicago winter had already crept up on him. He stocked up on coats and blankets from wherever he could find them and picked a lone house on the side of the road just outside of the city. The loneliness didn't get to him as much as the silence did. Mickey had felt lonely his whole life, not in some stupid ‘Nobody understands me!’ bullshit way, but in the way that he was a Milkovich. Milkovich's didn't talk about emotion, did not show any emotion other than anger and the only family bonding that existed in his house was when him and his brothers went on a run or beat somebody up together. He had been lonely in the way that people stuck for too long in a bad situation get lonely. Even though the loneliness was non-stop and unforgiving the silence was terrifying. Never had the Milkovich house been quiet. People were constantly running in and out, the TV was on more often than not, some utility was always broken and clunking alone while waiting for a repair that was never going to happen. Even after the break out and after Mickey had left the city with Mandy in tow Mandy had talked his ears off. The only time that she stopped talking was in her sleep. Mickey missed it, even though he would never admit that if he ever saw her again.
Most of the snow was off of the ground when Mickey set off to explore the now ruined city to find his house. He passed by crashed and abandoned cars, which he check for anything useful, not finding a single person as he crossed the city. It wasn't as quiet in Chicago, unlike the other cities that Mickey had passed through Chicago was still crumbling from the bombs that were dropped on it. Every once in awhile Mickey could hear a building give way in the distance, the sound reminding him that time was still moving. For some unknown reason South Side looked like it hadn't even been touched by the bombs, or maybe it had always looked run down and the damage just blended right in. The only difference that Mickey noticed was the way that the plants had grown. In the year and a half that he had been gone the grass had recovered from the blasts and grown higher than he had ever seen. Vines that had always been kept at and had found themselves wrapped around mail boxes and houses that had long since been left behind and forgotten. Mickey almost didn't recognize his house one he managed to make his way to it.
The house was covered in vines and the little house that could be seen from underneath the greenery had turned black from the smoke of the bombing. The porch had the same random assortment of crap that Mickey had left there and the stairs leading to the porch had remained somewhat intact. The fence surrounding the area had been bent almost to the ground and the gate had gone completely missing. Most of the windows had been smashed and the door was slightly ajar but looked intact. Mickey quickly looked around to confirm that the area was still deserted before he slowly made his way up the porch steps. He pulled out his best gun, the only one that still had a few bullets remaining in it, and used it to push the door fully open.
At this point most of those that had gotten infected had starved to death. They weren't the ones that Mickey was worried about. While Mickey had been fortunate enough to come across more friendly faces than not he had definitely come across a few ugly ones too. He knew that most of the people in the world were dead and that some of them were probably nice people, but Mickey didn't trust them. So he kept his gun up and ready to fire at any and all intruders until he had checked the whole house and all of its hiding places. He lowered the gun, finally letting himself take in his surroundings. If the house had been ransacked then Mickey couldn't tell, the messy house was the same as he always remembered it being. The posters that he had hung years before when he was a teenager still hung steadily on the wall, clothes were thrown all around the room and his bed was still unmade. Not that he expected some stranger to come and make his bed for him, but it would have been nice.
The sun was starting to set so Mickey busied himself with finding something sturdy to cover the windows with and dragging the couch over to block the front door. He set about making a fire in the living room and making himself an expired can of spaghetti-o's. They tasted like shit, they always had, but it wasn't beans so he lived through it. He dragged the mattress and his old comforter out into the living room, close enough to the fire to feel the heat but far enough away not to catch on fire. He slowly slipped off to sleep, dreaming of nothing at all.
Mickey started awake ready to fight whatever or whoever was there, but there was nobody and nothing. Soon after his body realized that there was no need to be producing adrenaline he realized that it was just the sound of another building, far off into the city, crashing under its own weight that woke him up. He worked on leveling out his breathing and waited for his heart to slow before he got ready for another day exploring the city. He cleaned up the previous night's dinner and put his mattress back into its original place on his bed. He decided that he would come back so he left the bits of the burnt out fire on the floor and dragged the couch away from the door, back to the living room in front of the dead fire and smashed TV.
The smell of death is not something that Mickey ever got used to, and it was something that he couldn't avoid. He didn't check the dead bodies that laid on the streets and in lawns for faces or familiarity, only to see if they had anything useful in their pockets when they died. Sometimes he would turn a body over to check the front pockets and be met with a face he used to see at school or around the neighborhood. He tried not to let it affect him. People die, he thought. It would have happened anyway. He continued to pass body after body and check every house he passed in case the people before him missed anything.
He reached the Kash and Grab when the sun was high in the air and made him feel too warm for his jacket. The Kash and Grab was surprisingly well intact. Just like every other place the windows were smashed, but these were boarded up with plywood, and the sign was broken and ridden with bullet holes. Mickey remembered this place perfectly from not too long before everything went to shit and he didn't have the money to get any food. He would pay a visit to the Kash and Grab and take whatever he wanted, the owner was a pussy and let him get away with it. For a brief moment he wondered what happened to Kash, but once he stepped inside the small store, still somewhat stocked with food, he realized he didn't really care. Mickey took a quick survey of the store to make sure no one was around and wondered over to the freezers that kept the drinks. The power everywhere stopped working once the bombs started to drop so he knew that all of the drinks would be warm, and most of them gross and flat, but anything with flavor was heaven sent so he didn't mind. He was working his way through deciding on if he was going to drink the Red Bull or the Dr Pepper first when he heard a door slam and someone whistling.
“Mickey?”