Current mood:

good

neighbours zombie fic: the beany dead!
I really would like to know where I can cross-post this. There's no such thing as a Neighbours fic community on LJ that I can find. Which is TERRIBLE. Also, I'm deeply in love with this fic right now. Oh, Harold. Oh, zombies.

Title: The Beany Dead.
Author: Jess.
Rating: Z for ZOMBIES (that is R for violence and crack).
Fandom: Neighbours.
Warning: Zombie style gore. Soybeans.
Notes: Timeline-wise: Lou is living with Harold and Skye has had Kerry. I’m not sure that it actually fits in the timeline, but it what can you do. Soaps move too fast! Unbetaed. I was inspired to finish this by blabbing about how I need to finish stuff: guilt! It really works!
Summary: Harold grows more than he bargained for with Paul Robinson’s Organic Fertilizer.

---

"Those soy beans are growing well, Harold."

"Aren't they! This summer sun seems to be doing them the world of good. And this fertilizer! I know Paul Robinson's had his problems in the past, but this organic fertilizer business of his is really a step forward."

"Oh, yes, mate. Very environmentally friendly. If you can trust Paul," Lou says.

"Don't mock Lou, everyone deserves a second chance, even him," Harold replies, a stern finger wagging in Lou's direction. "It's a good thing!"

"Can't say the same about the smell. Well, I'm going in for a cuppa."

"Suit yourself, Lou. Waste this glorious day inside!" Harold says, smiling, and takes a deep breath of sunshine and summer air and Paul Robinson's organic fertilizer. Well, it didn't smell beautiful, exactly, but the knowledge it was helping beautiful things grow helped infinitely.

---

Midnight in Ramsey St.

Harold tosses and turns in his bed, a strange dream of craving something, something red and wet and... he wakes up with a gasp. For a moment in the silence of his bedroom, he's not sure why he woke. Baby Kerry wasn't crying. No Skye shuffling around. And then he heard it again. The same as in his dreams.

Something was calling him. It chilled his blood.

He got up to investigate.

After peeking in on Skye and Kerry's rooms, he felt a little less worried. He went out into the back yard, slippers soaking in the dew of the lawn.

He was getting closer to the sound. He could almost make out the words, hundreds of voices calling through the night, softly, thinly, just to him.

He reached his garden and clutched his chest in shock.

Their tiny soy bean mouths, a partially cracked shell, flapping regularly, nearly naturally with their calls. Their tiny rows of sharp milk teeth glittered in front of the beans inside.

"Feed us, Harold! Feed us more! Come closer..."

Harold takes a step towards them, to look closer at their subtly moving forms. It has to be a trick. Scott and Dylan. Something. He can't just be going... crazy.

He pushes a hand into the bushes to look for the microphone, stereo, something, and SNAP. He jerks away, falling to the lawn.

It hurts, but it's really only a tiny scratch, jaggedly torn into his finger. When he looks, the bean that bit him is already shut again, darker than before, fed on his own blood. The other around it rustle the bush violently in excitement.

"FEED US! FEED US!"

Harold makes his way back inside at a brisk pace. He's dreaming. He must be dreaming.

---

Harold wakes, just on dawn.

"What a strange dream," he mumbles to himself and stumbles out of bed. He makes tea and gazes out into the backyard. Skye and Kerry both sleep on in their rooms.

Harold feels warm. It's a cool five a.m., but his face is running with sweat. The tea feels fantastically hot against his hand, though it's been sitting long enough to only be lukewarm by now. It burns him, and he drops the cup, the lukewarm liquid spilling across the floor, the mug cracking but not breaking.

"Oh, bother," he says and shakes his head. He looks down at his throbbing hand... and finally sees the teeth marks! Bleeding sluggishly, there’s a wound on his hand right where the beans had bitten him in his dream. He gasps and it all spins back into focus: it wasn't a dream!

He rushes to his bedroom and finds sheets and a pillow soaked with blood. He stares at his hand in horror.

It's nearly entirely green.

---

In the dawn light Harold is sweating and squint eyed by his soy bean patch. They're mumbling now, but he can hear them. He's burning up.

How could this have happened? How?

A tiny bean on the right opens it's lips, and he reaches out uncontrollably to touch it. It bites his finger, rending the flesh from the bone from his knuckle down.

He doesn't feel any pain. He doesn't feel any shock.

His whole arm is green.

"How?" He asks them. He puts his finger's bone into his mouth and sucks all the blood he can from the wound. It tastes like the best vege-burger he's ever had. The most perfect cup of herbal tea. A slice of Madge's carrot cake. He wants more.

"The fertilizer, Harold," a bean giggles from somewhere in the middle of the bushy garden. The soy beans seem to have taken over overnight, cannibalizing their fellow veges. They're all that's left.

"No!" Harold gasps.

But he's not shocked, when he thinks about it. It's makes perfect sense. It's the only possible explanation.

---

Harold rushes through the house, ignoring Skye's worried calls from the kitchen. Her voice is distorted inside his burning head. His ears feel as if they're stuffed with something. All he can hear is the soy beans. Still calling for food. For... flesh. And god help him, it's all he can do to resist.

He jumps in the car and bleeds over the steering wheel, tearing out of the driveway horribly fast. He hears a muffled scream and the car jolts, but he drives on unheeding. Looking in his mirror, he sees he's killed Elle.

Instead of remorse, all he feels is hunger. There's not much meat on her bones, but she looks as delicious as any couscous or risotto he’s ever had.

No! No! He speeds the slowing car again. He has to find out! Why! Why! He heads in the direction of Paul Robinson's fertilizer factory, mowing down anything in his path, veering wildly in the car but uncaring. His vision is narrowed to meat. Hunt. HUNGER. But his mind clings to one this: he has to know.

---

Harold pulls the car up outside the factory, crashing lightly into the chain link fence. His hand has stopped bleeding from the original wound and the finger, but in his hunger he's gnawed the flesh off three more of his fingers.

He struggles out of the car, and falls into the dirt, hearing something snap but ignoring it.

His entire left side is green now.

Harold rises, elbow hanging at a broken, unnatural angle, dripping blood from his hand into the dirt.

He can barely read. Everything is so hot. So hungry.

Paul... Robinson... he reads... Fertiliz... so, so hungry. He wonders is Elle's corpse is still warm... no! Fertilizer Plant! And next door: The Erinsborough Nuclear Waste Facility.

Elle's cooling flesh would be so sweet--- NO! But... Paul, he could go and tear Paul's face, eat his tongue, the sweet meats inside... NO! NO! Have to find out first. Have to make it.

On the other side of the fertilizer plant is The Genetic Research Facility: ErinsGenRec.

No! No! NOOOOOOOOO!

Harold claws at his face with protruding bones and fingers alike. It explains everything! Nuclear mutant soy beans with zombification powers and a taste for flesh. This is why he was vegetarian. Organic food never had these problems! Paul had lied about his fertilizer. I must have been made from a combination of dead research plants and animals from ErinsGenRec and nuclear waste!

His entire face was green now. His entire body.

He falls to the ground, clawing at his face, with one last thought:

Paul Robinson. Hungry.

---

Harold wakes up in his car, parked in his driveway.

He's never sure how he got home, and his mind is no longer equipped to care or reason it out. There are garden gnomes, toddlers and half an old lady lodged under the rims of his car wheels. He doesn't think about that too much, except to lick some blood from the car’s bumper bar.

"So much for vegetarianism," he says to himself slowly and chuckles good naturedly, in a disturbing parody of his normal laugh. He makes his way to the back garden, to talk to his lovely, beautiful, hungry beans.

---

Inside the house, Harold shuffles over to Skye.

"Skye," he says, "how you?"

"Grandpa?" She says, raising an eyebrow and prepared to laugh at his joke... but... "Grandpa, you're looking awfully green... and is that a soybean up your sleeve?!"

Outside, the street echoes with a scream.

---

Lou comes home, makes himself a coffee and sits on the couch to finally relax for the day.

Harold shuffles into the room, Skye behind him.

"Hello old bean," Lou says without looking up. "I made you a cuppa."

There's silence.

"Harold, did something just fall into your coffee?" Lou asks. "It looked like... is that a soybean?"

"Harold? HAROLD? ARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRGH! NO! MY FLESH!"

---

"Hey, Hazza," Toady says, "can I borrow your-- ARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRGH!"

---

Paul. Harold thinks. He's still hungry. Kerry was only a tiny morsel, and he had to fight Skye for her leg. The baby in question looked up at him from her crib, legless but giggling and gurgling happily. Hungrily.

"I bring you back some Paul," Harold promises and tweaks her nose.

At the Robinson residence: "I can't believe you're killing me again," Paul says to Harold.

"It wasn't believable first time," Harold shrugs, and goes to Paul's face, his bean-y minions taking the legs.

---

The unholy union of zombie and soybean spreads. Today, Erinsborough.

Tomorrow: the world.

---

The End.