SPXZMB-038
by K. Stonham
first released 25th April 2010

The end came with a crunch, as Will flew briefly through the night then stopped with the abrupt intervention of a building. The 'Con, the ugly purple one that disguised itself as a truck like Optimus, didn't even spare a glance as he fell from the brickwork to the asphalt. Given how bad he hurt, the shouting and gunfire fading away into blackness was a mercy, really.

The beginning came with a low, grinding drag of air through mouth and throat and into lungs that didn't seem to want to work the way they should. His body didn't seem to want to work, either. It felt like some parts were missing and those that weren't were broken, even though there was no pain. But Will was nothing if not determined and eventually managed to pull himself together. One shoulder was definitely dislocated and given that his leg on the same side seemed to be broken, it made for a lopsided, shambling gait. His face felt sticky and swollen, like he had been sunburnt and then his burns covered in that horrible green goo Sarah swore by-

Sarah. He needed to get to Sarah. She had to be okay.

Orienting himself by the sun blistering overhead, Will moved forward.

There were people eventually, who buzzed and chattered like insects, but he ignored them, moving on even when they got in his way, trying to stop him. They were irrelevant; they weren't Sarah.

He was doing pretty well, making good progress out of the city, until metal fingers caged him, scooping up into the air, turning him and bringing him close to a dark alien face that examined him. "-ox," he heard the creature call him. Faintly, as though from underwater.

He knew this person. Not Sarah, something completely different, but...

A name came forth from his muddled brain. "'Hide?" Major William Lennox managed to croak.

No one knew quite what to make of the situation. Most of NEST were "freaked out," as the vernacular put it, and Ratchet couldn't say it was without justification. Their commanding officer had disappeared during the latest battle with the Decepticons, and given Major Lennox's character it was unthinkable to imply any type of cowardice or subterfuge involved. The Decepticons had been quelled, so that eliminated any possibility of a kidnapping. For over a day they'd combed the city, looking for (it was feared) his corpse.

Certainly none of them had expected his corpse to end up walking right past them.

Well, "corpse" was perhaps too strong a descriptor, given that he did in fact have a heartbeat (albeit one operating at a mere one-tenth of the pace it usually did) and that his brain did show low levels of activity. He had certainly recognized Ironhide, which was a good sign. The major was a mess, though, with abraded flesh, broken bones, and internal bleeding stemmed only by the slowed pace of his heart. That reduced heartbeat was, however, causing other problems as his tissues were slowly being starved of needed oxygen.

And yet the man's only concern was to get to his wife! Every time he was released, the Major immediately began walking with unerring direction toward his residence in California, hundreds of miles away. It forced Ironhide to relinquish all other tasks in favor of carrying the clearly injured man, while Captain Graham took over as the mission's CO.

At least, Ratchet mused, if one ignored his new-found homing pigeon instincts, Major Lennox was being a docile patient for a change.

Ironhide was worried. Lennox was the human he was closest to, and it didn't take Ratchet's medical knowledge to tell that something was very, very wrong with the man. A quick conference with Graham and Epps resulted in the cargo plane heading toward California rather than Diego Garcia, and Epps putting in a call to his wife to collect Sarah and Annabelle Lennox and bring them to the base there.

Just in case.

If Lennox was going to die, the man deserved to see his wife first. And Sarah would never forgive Ironhide if he didn't get her the chance to say goodbye. Not after he'd already failed to protect Lennox.

It made for an uncomfortable, nearly silent plane ride as NEST worried for their commander and Ratchet worried for his patient and Ironhide worried for his friend.

At least, until Ratchet made an electronic sound that was akin to the human phrase "Eureka!"

Ironhide raised an optical ridge at the medic, who had the luxury of being folded away into his vehicular form during the flight, and got chirped a section of Lennox's medical file in return.

Apparently during his Army Ranger days, before Ironhide had ever set foot on this planet, Lennox had been part of an experimental regiment which had been inoculated with certain drugs that were extremely not legal, either at the time or now. It was the details of one of them, codenamed SPXZMB-038, that had Ratchet excited. They did, Ironhide admitted, seem to fit Will's symptoms perfectly.

Well, now you know what's causing it, so fix it already, Ironhide shot back irritably via comm line.

It's not that simple, the medic replied. Ironhide could practically hear his CPU whirring, going down different paths of medical inquiry. There was never intended to be a cure. The serum is a method of last resort. It's very likely all that's keeping him alive, Ironhide.

Ironhide looked down at the figure in his hands. Lennox's body was shattered in places, broken bones aligned and splinted and dermal injuries cleaned and bandaged only so much as human and robotic medics had been able to manage with the patient held still in Ironhide's hands. Will's eyes were unfocused and his breathing shallow, labored. At least, Ironhide admitted, he didn't seem to be in pain.

So you're suggesting... palliative care, Ironhide replied carefully. It was at its core a distasteful idea to him. But he and Ratchet had long since known that they would never see optic-to-optic on many matters.

If you have any ideas, feel free to contribute.

Sarah was going to kill him. And then she was going to fall apart and Monique was going to take care of things, and once Monique was done and had a spare minute, Monique was going to kill him. All of which Bobby didn't mind too much because thinking about that would keep him from thinking about this. From thinking about Lennox being held like a doll in Ironhide's hands, not alive but not exactly dead either. Because a man could only take so much sometimes and out there in the desert, under the cold stars with a can of cheap-ass brew in either of their hands, Will Lennox had once told him once about his old unit, about the so-called "performance enhancing" drug they'd all gotten. About how eventually, one or two or three at a time, they'd fallen to enemy fire until he was the last one left.

Crazy Will Lennox with all the luck and all the desperation in the world.

Because he'd seen, he said, what had happened after his brothers in arms had fallen. Seen how they got back up afterward, bodies broken and eyes empty, and kept going. He'd seen how they couldn't, wouldn't, be stopped, and how they'd torn out the eyes and throats and guts of the guys emptying lead into them, and then taken those same entrails and stuffed them in their mouths.

He'd never been sure before whether it was one of those tall tales that guys told, or if it was true. Because Captain William Lennox was one of those people he just couldn't read sometimes. And now he was a sand demon with empty eyes that they were taking home to the one person he loved better than all the world, and Bobby just couldn't see any way this could, would, end well.

He felt cool, like all the heat, the life, in him was draining away, drawn out by the air, by the relentless hum of the plane's engines, by the voices that spoke once in a while in low murmurs around him. Ironhide's fingers burned where they touched him and he knew that was wrong somehow. That no matter how black the paint or how scorching the summer sun, the Autobot's plating always remained cool to the touch, energy drawn inside to fuel systems more advanced than anything else on Earth. And Sarah laughing at him for being surprised-"Honey, he's not from around here," she kept reminding him. "You gotta roll with it."

Everything kept slipping away to that, to Sarah. He'd promised himself nothing would ever happen to her. And everyone who'd ever made some kind of stupid promise to him to keep him safe really knew that they were keeping him safe for Sarah, because she was the one thing that really mattered to Will.

I don't care how far over top secret it's classified, Ratchet warned down the line to General Morshower. Major Lennox is dying and I need the information on that drug!

From the minute she agreed to marry Will, Sarah had always been waiting in the back of her mind for this day to come. She'd thought it had once before, that his luck had run out when the base in Qatar had been destroyed. But he'd escaped, with Bobby, and Ironhide had brought him home to her.

At least it was Monique, and not some nameless minion in uniform, who had come to her door. At least they were bringing him to her, or her to him.

At least, Sarah thought, looking out the SUV window at the trees moving on the other side, he wouldn't die alone.

They'd all died alone, the guys in his unit. They'd been gunned down or blown to bits, and then after picking themselves back up and continuing to fight, they'd died again, cut in half by an automatic or by having more than just an arm or leg taken off by the next bomb. That was not how Will Lennox wanted to die.

Not that he wanted to die at all, but it seemed fairly inevitable given what had happened to the others in the past and the way things were continuing to go. He knew hospital voices, the way people talked around the dying.

He knew, though he wasn't supposed to, the autopsy results for every single member of that team. Sandburg, Rodriguez, Wells, Huntley, and Chang. Timmons, Grier, Cafferty, Slovak. And now Lennox. The last one.

Except, he thought, they were all dead and he wasn't, not yet. And he hadn't completed his mission. The most important one. The one Sarah gave him every time he left. "You be careful, Will Lennox," she said, punctuating it with a kiss, "and come home back to us."

As fragging fragile, complicated, and alien as human biology was, there was no way Ratchet was going to be able to fix things this time. Give him a month, and Perceptor, and a proper laboratory, and maybe he'd be able to come up with a counter-agent that wouldn't kill Lennox outright in the process. As it was, all he could to was review the pre-human testing, and the victim autopsies and associated witness reports, and marvel at the callousness of a government that had ever thought a serum like this one was a good idea.

"Where," Sarah Lennox bit out, "is my husband?"

NEST was, to a man, quick to get out of her way. Toddler daughter hefted onto one hip, the woman headed straight for Ironhide, looking expectantly at the alien who clearly held something-or more importantly, someONE-in his huge metal hands. Almost noiselessly, he knelt and opened his hands, setting his charge on the ground.

Sarah stopped cold. She'd seen corpses three days dead that looked better than her husband. Even accounting for all the taped-on gauze bandages and the fact that he had no less than three splints on him, Will looked gray and yellow and purple, all kinds of colors that weren't healthy on humans. The way he stood and moved, she wasn't sure he wasn't going to fall over and then just keep pulling himself forward like some poor octopus out of its tank.

"Sarah," he grated, and his voice was low and hollow. Like he had nothing left.

She took a breath and crossed the remaining several feet to him, shifting Annie back a bit so she could take him in her other arm, press up against his cold body, tuck her face into his neck and breathe him in just as he did the same to her.

Ratchet shifted straighter, surprised. As he watched, the Major's heartbeat began a slow, steady increase which, fortunately or unfortunately, put color back into his face and caused blood to finally start seeping through his injuries, tainting the sterile gauze pads pink. The increased bloodflow also seemed to ratchet up his neurological functions. Lennox's brainwaves came out of their low operational state and returned to something more like normal.

All of which meant that Ratchet just caught a pained "Aw, hell," before Lennox turned white and collapsed as his nerves dumped on him the accumulated pain of the last thirty-six hours, knocking him out cold on the hangar floor to his wife's alarmed cry.

"Absolutely stunning," the man on the other end of the line, a Dr. Jon Watkins, said. "None of the others survived their initial injuries more than a few hours. And Major Lennox is making a full recovery, you said?"

"A complete recovery," Ratchet, who as far as Dr. Watkins knew was 'Dr. Ray Hatchet', one of NEST's physicians, replied. He was still suppressing the urge to growl at all members of the idiot team who had developed the drug. Cussing them out, Prime had also informed him, was not on the agenda.

"Fascinating," Watkins replied. "Do you suppose we could arrange a few tests? Just a couple blood and tissue samples should be enough-"

"Out of the question," Ratchet bit out. "Lennox is out on medical leave until I decide he's fit to return to duty, and then he's going to be far too busy to get caught up in your studies."

"But-" The doctor's plea was plaintive.

"Perhaps you should consider," Ratchet cut him off, looking through the window into the recovery ward where Lennox's wife sat by his bed and his daughter straddled his knees, playing something called "pattycake" with her father, "that it was simply a case that the Major had something to live for, and leave his survival at that."

Author's Note: Edited by my Wonderful Husband. And, okay, an explanatory note: this was written for the LiveJournal "Flesh And Steel" community's zombie challenge in April/May of 2010. I wasn't going to participate, mainly for lack of ideas, until CazCartharsis reminded everyone of the deadline and all of a sudden people started posting their entries. So I went to sleep that night and dreamt the core of what turned into this fic, and then woke up the next morning and started writing it and got it turned in in time for the challenge. (Which I won. Yay!) Therefore, I declare this entirely Caz's fault. And JunshoWolfeh's since it was her fic Demon Trucks that started the whole thing and her commentary on it that I'm pretty sure decided my subconscious on who to zombify.

All their faults. Really.