Philadelphia didn't look all that different since the zombie apocalypse started up. There were a lot more jaywalkers, that was for sure, and the newer buildings showed the wear of the last two months, but overall it was unchanged.

Eggsy, who hadn't liked it before, was largely disappointed by this.

"I've been sent to prisons in third world countries that were nicer than this city," Eggsy said, his voice echoing off the tall, grungy buildings.

"There used to be a lot more culture," Julia piped up in her thick Jersey accent.

Eggsy was about to tell her that culture was relative for a country with an expansive three-hundred-year history, but a moaning hiss from around the corner kept him quiet. He held up his hand and his little group of survivors came to a halt, all deadly silent and still. He liked them, he really did, and he'd done his best to keep them breathing on his race to the closest American branch of Kingsman. There was a whole lot he wasn't telling them, but since he could mow down a few dozen dead people without breaking a sweat, they followed him anyway.

The streets stayed empty for a long, quiet moment. Eggsy didn't buy it for a second.

"Back the way we came," he whispered. "Slowly."

They listened and started backing up, edging down the road, hefting weapons and scanning for cover. They were out in the open now, not the best of places but a surprising amount of the city was just that, and a distressing distance from their base of operations (the Ritz, which was seven kinds of amusing to Eggsy). There was another sound, this one from behind them, and Eggsy raised his hand to halt the group again.

A zombie came around the corner by the town hall. It tilted its head to look at them and snarled.

Seconds later, the whole mass of the hoard, hundreds or more, spilled out behind it.

"Everyone run!" Eggsy yelled, turned to run down a side street – and found more zombies coming for them that way. "Fuck!"

Julia crashed into his back, screaming as the zombies raced towards them, and the others clustered there, their few weapons and fewer bullets ready. Eggsy whirled, yanked off his signet ring, and shoved it into Julia's hands.

"Take this and head straight for the place I told you about, alright?"

"Eggsy what-?"

"There's no time. Go. Run!"

She was about to ask go where, he could tell, but Eggsy whipped out his last grenade, saved for a rainy day, and lobbed it into an alley. A hole opened in the hoard and he shoved Julia towards it.

"Go!"

With that, Eggsy bolted in the opposite direction. It was probably not his brightest of moves, he thought as he whooped and shot into the air and generally made a spectacle of himself, leaving civilians to break into a Kingsman branch without an agent, but none of them would have been able to pull off the distraction either.

So, this was it.

He'd had a good run - damn good, really. He couldn't complain too much, though he would've like to be closer to home, maybe, or just have some prospect of a burial rather than, you know, being eaten alive.

See, this all started two months ago while Eggsy was in the states on a basic reconnaissance mission about a smuggling ring. Suddenly everything got real 28 days later real fast and all he got for intel was a clip from Merlin that it might've had something to do with Valentine's stupid untested radiation.

Eggsy thought there was something to be said for cosmic justice that, one, all the people killed on V-Day had come back for revenge, and two, had Valentine succeeded he would have emerged to a world of people who gave even fewer fucks about the environment.

So yeah, most of those who'd survived the first rage wave were now a zombified mass, and Eggsy'd done real great up until then, when he'd played bait for a bunch of other inexplicably un-raged people and got himself surrounded outside Jefferson Station.

Eggsy was no slouch, but beating a few thousand opponents at once was beyond him - especially when he had to kill streak the lot to have the slightest chance of making it.

And only six bullets.

So he was going to die in a mob of zombies in Phila-fucking-delphia, but hey, there were worse ways to go out.

Eggsy cocked his gun, put on his best smirk and said, "Come on then, you bastards," as the whole of the only slightly less amiable population descended on him.

Before the first bullet left his gun and punctured two heads in its path, he thought of Harry. He thought of Merlin's voice, telling Eggsy to make him proud, thought of Harry leisurely and smiling and kind. He never needed to make him proud, for some reason, but even so, once again, he resolved to.

The six bullets were gone in an instant and he was left with his bare hands and whatever he could pick up against the press of the hoard, thousands and thousands of mad and dying and dead people all gunning for the china-thin filo that was his skull.

It was like an avalanche, as long as he kept moving he could keep his head up, stay alive. They were quick and hungry and relentless, but he was faster, better, trained. And he wouldn't last forever, but he was at least going to take as many with him as he could.

One got a hand on his collar, just enough to slow him down, just enough to trip him, and his heart jumped into his throat. Sinatra played in his head, an audio track set to flashes of his life, hope for his family.

Then something like a cannonball landed at his back and he was free. Eggsy had a vision of shitty Resident Evil CGI monsters, some new hell for the survivors, but when he turned it was just a person.

Except it wasn't just a person. Eggsy forgot about the seething death all around him while he watched Harry fucking Hart push himself to his feet in slow motion. It had to be slow motion, because Harry had to be up the next second and ripping through the crowd with brutal elegance, like he'd been doing this all along, like he leapt from his own laptop screen from that godforsaken church to right there, where Eggsy was going to die.

"Eggsy!" He shouted, and Eggsy smashed back into reality and his fist into one of the zombie's faces.

"Harry what the fuck!?" Eggsy shouted back, elated and mixed up because now Harry was just going to die again, assuming he wasn't a hallucination.

"Later," Harry shouted in reply.

"Haz," Eggsy scolded, jamming the slider of his gun into someone's eye. There wouldn't be a later.

Then Harry was at his back, warm and solid while they awaited the next wave. Harry's voice was low, reverberated through his bones as he said, with unshakable confidence and bland amusement: "I think we can handle one city." Harry handed him a loaded gun and squared up against the incoming mob. "Now, are we going to stand around all day, or are we going to fight?"

Fuck it, Eggsy thought. He cocked his gun, grinning so wide his face hurt, and turned to the twisted army of zombies.

Later did come, and saw Eggsy gasping for breath in a little boutique, half the fucking city mowed down outside and the other half right pissed, with Harry tucked so close he could almost taste him.

"Hello, Eggsy," Harry said at last. Eggsy looked up at him, at the dark eyepatch over one eye and familiar glowing affection in the other.

"Harry," Eggsy said, more reverently than he'd meant to "How?"

"Did I survive?" Harry drawled, reaching for his eyepatch. "Strictly speaking, I didn't."

Harry's eye beneath the patch was red, blood and fire and roses. He smiled a little self-deprecating smile, and Eggsy started to laugh. He clung to Harry's solid, warm body, and figured one of them had the devil's fucking luck.