Title: Dead is Dead-ish
Rating: PG-13
Pairing: Jack/Sayid, Sayid/Nadia, Jack/Kate
Word Count: 2,910
Warnings: goes AU once the O6 get off the island but still spoilery for S4 and 5
Summary: For the hc_bingo prompt zombie apocalypse - Jacob takes a different approach to get the Oceanic 6 to return to the island.

+++

"Excuse me, sir? Could you help me?" Sayid turns towards the voice to see a blond man wearing an embarrassed smile. "I'm sorry, I think I'm lost. Are you from Los Angeles?"

Sayid steps back towards the sidewalk. "What are you looking for?"

Nadia's triumphant shout of, "I found them!" sounds too far away, and it has Sayid looking up in time to see the car hurtling forward, and then it's like a video that's downloading too slow, the sounds and images coming to him out of sync. There's the sharp crunch of breaking bone and metal that he doesn't seem to hear until after seeing Nadia flying through the air. He feels the stranger's hand on his shoulder before he sees the car speed off, and Sayid doesn't register running to her side, just collapsing to his knees to pull Nadia close to his chest.

He thinks the anguished sound is being ripped from her throat, but only when he sees that Nadia's lips are still does he know it's his. "Nadia! Nadia?"

"Take me home," Nadia says softly, and he has to lean close to hear her. She repeats herself, the Arabic sounding foreign after not hearing it on her tongue in so long. She dies in his arms, her sunglasses still held in her hand.

Sayid pulls her body even tighter to his, crying into her hair as a crowd gathers around them, and he can vaguely hear an ambulance approaching.

The change in tension is the first clue that something's wrong. He can feel Nadia's muscles bunching even though Sayid can't feel her chest rising and falling with breath against his.

"Nadia?" he tries again, keeping his voice even while loosening his hold to get a look at her face because surely he's hallucinating, gone mad with his grief, but her eyes are open - not focused on him, but open. Nadia opens her mouth, a wet, pained groan coming from deep inside, but then she lunges, managing to grab Sayid's arm and sink her teeth into the back of it before he wrenches out of her grip, unable to process what has happened to his wife.

He runs.

+

Sayid doesn't immediately recognize his surroundings when he wakes up in a living room, sprawled out on a sofa with his arm bandaged. It takes a clipped female voice in the distance to get him to realize that he's at Jack's house. He can't remember getting there.

He sits up slowly, allowing a minute for the dizziness to pass before standing and walking into the kitchen where Jack and Kate are fighting, probably over him. "If you do not mind, I think I shall have some water before I am on my way."

Kate at least looks embarrassed as she gets a glass for him, filling it from a spigot inside the refrigerator. "Where's Nadia, Sayid?"

He takes the glass, drinking all of it in large, greedy gulps. Sayid feels warm and the skin on his arm itches. "I am unsure," he responds, looking straight at Kate and then Jack. "She is supposed to be dead."

+

It turns out that whatever happened to Nadia isn't an isolated incident.

"A patient died in surgery last month," Jack says, his eyes haunted. "I was scrubbing out while one of the nurses stitched him back up, and he just… sat up. His intestines were hanging out of his body, but he was walking around."

Sayid notices how Kate doesn't look at Jack at all while he talks. "What happened then?"

"He, uh, he ripped the nurse's throat out with his teeth. I got the rest of them out of there and locked the door. Eventually these CDC agents showed up, said it was a new form of rabies, but…" Jack trails off and looks at Kate, but she's focused away from him with tears in her eyes. "It was like those movies, Sayid - the Evil Dead Trilogy."

This is when Kate can't seem to take it anymore, standing quickly while muttering, "I'm sorry; Aaron's crying," before disappearing upstairs despite Sayid not hearing a thing.

"She thinks I'm losing my mind," Jack says as a means of explanation. He leans forward so his forearms are resting on his knees. "Like I'm caving under the pressure of our story or something."

Sayid's mind keeps spinning back to the films Jack mentioned, though; a reference he's sure Sawyer would've gotten perfectly clear, but Sayid doesn't quite grasp the meaning. "What do you mean, Jack, by evil dead?"

Jack stands, crossing into the kitchen to grab a bottle from the cupboard above the refrigerator and a glass for himself. He returns to the living room, holding the bottle out to Sayid, who just shakes his head to decline the offer. He watches Jack pour a mouthful of tequila before knocking it back; he then repeats the process twice more.

"Jack?" Sayid tries again but more slowly. "What do you mean?"

"The walking dead, Sayid. Fucking zombies."

+

He returns to Iraq to bury a casket with no body, but Sayid lays down Nadia's wedding dress and a photo of them together. It seems wrong to know that her image is smiling while underground, but it's all he can do.

"Why are you here?" Sayid asks when he feels a presence behind him.

"I've come to pay my respects, Sayid. To tell you that I'm sorry and that I know who's responsible for Nadia's death."

He turns to look at Ben, disbelieving. "Do you know who's responsible for the fact that I can't even bury her?"

Ben shakes his head but his eyes don't waver from Sayid's. "No, but the people who killed Nadia weren't after her, they were after you. All of you. We can help keep them safe."

Sayid looks at the headstone, reading the dates below her name. Just someone else who was lost too soon because he couldn't save them. "What would you have me do?"

+

When he starts, Sayid has to learn how to deal with the risen corpses after he's killed them. A skull-crushing blow to the head works, but Sayid soon learns that decapitation is the surest way to keep them from coming back. It makes the hits messy, but at least they stay dead, and somehow, no matter where they go, Ben seems to know people who can clean and cover it up. Even in the Seychelles.

Elsa is simultaneously the hardest to kill while the easiest to make sure she won't come back.

Two years he works for Ben, killing to keep the Oceanic 6 safe from Charles Widmore. He can't have them die for fear of them coming back; they can't suffer the same horrific fate as Nadia. She'd wanted to go home, but she's still out there, somewhere, wandering and infecting like the rest of the dead have done.

The sickness has spread; it's become both a joke and a horror story told to children at bedtime.

Sayid's sick of running. He needs to find his wife and put her to rest.

He kills Andropov and then removes his head with a meat cleaver.

"Where to now?" he asks Ben afterwards.

Ben considers this for a moment. "Nowhere. You're done."

The words are still a shock, like a sudden blast of cold air. He'd never expected to actually be finished. There's a groan followed by a scream somewhere in the distance.

"What do I do now?" he asks. Sayid can't help it; he's been taking orders on every move for the last two years.

"I suppose you should go live your life," Ben replies, sounding like he has as much of an idea of what that still means as Sayid does. That is to say, none at all. "You're free, Sayid."

+

He goes back to Los Angeles but doesn't even know where to start. The government has been trying to control the situation, to corral the zombies and take care of them en masse. Sayid hopes someone's been trying to take pictures, to give the families some peace that their loved one is truly dead.

He goes to Jack figuring that, with the amount of dead that end up in hospitals, he would know.

"I proposed to Kate," Jack says when he opens the door, holding a beer in one hand while the other is against the frame, holding him up.

"I'm sorry, Jack," Sayid replies, hazarding a guess that Kate said no.

Jack laughs at him, though, shaking his head slightly. "No, don't apologize. She said yes. I just…" He looks at the beer bottle clutched in his hand. "You should come inside."

They sit in the living room, positions mirroring that from two years ago.

"I keep seeing my father," Jack begins like he can't even believe it himself.

"I thought his body was on-"

"It is," Jack interrupts before Sayid can say the island. "It is," Jack repeats like he's daring Sayid to oppose him.

They stare at each other silently for a moment before Sayid decides to get to the point of his visit. "I stopped by, Jack, because I was wondering if you knew what is being done with the walking dead. I can't… I don't like knowing that what was once my Nadia could still be out there somewhere, infecting more people."

Jack takes a long pull from his beer, and Sayid watches the muscles in his neck flex as he swallows. "The CDC's been gathering them, incinerating them. There's a hotline to report sightings… There's no way she's still out there, Sayid."

"I should be going, then," Sayid says, standing quickly, and Jack rises as well, following him out, moving to get between Sayid and the door.

"Is that really why you came, Sayid? Two years none of us heard anything from you, and then you just show up at my house."

"I was out of the country," Sayid replies, not meeting Jack's gaze. He can't have Jack knowing what he was really up to.

"I'm sorry about Nadia." Jack's leaning in so close that Sayid can't smell anything but the beer on his breath, and then it's all he can taste as Jack is kissing him, hard and desperate, and it makes Sayid groan with pleasure, but he pushes Jack away. Because Jack is engaged to Kate, and because the last three people he's kissed died - the most recent by his own hand.

Sayid leaves and goes to LAX, taking the next Oceanic flight with seats available.

+

He doesn't believe it when Locke shows up out of the blue, in a wheelchair, to tell Sayid that all of them have to go back.

"Everything's gone wrong since you all left," he says, "and it's affecting the rest of the world."

Sayid pauses his hammering of roofing tiles to look down at Locke. "Are you telling me that the dead are reanimating because of the island?"

"It's throwing off the balance, Sayid, the natural order of things."

Sayid's been forced into believing a lot of things since Nadia died, but he can't believe that the island is somehow responsible for this, that the evil of the place can blanket the entire planet.

When Locke leaves, Sayid doesn't go with him.

+

The next one to visit is Ben, and Sayid nearly cuts his thumb off with the table saw when Ben tells him that Locke's dead, actually dead.

Sayid flies back to Los Angeles with Ben. He needs to see it for himself.

"One of Widmore's people did it," Ben tells him on the plane. "He has someone watching Hugo right now."

"Why?"

"He wants to go back to the island, Sayid. He's been trying to get back for a long time now, and Charles knows that it'll be the only place safe from what's happening."

"John told me that if we go back it'll stop."

Ben reads a page in his book before responding. "That's probably true."

"Why is Locke dead?"

Ben lowers the book, eyeing Sayid critically over his glasses. "You mean why has he stayed dead? I don't know, Sayid. Why didn't you become one of them when Nadia bit your arm?" He stares pointedly at the faint arches of scar tissue. "We both know it doesn't take a fatal wound to become infected."

Sayid's silent, considering, for the rest of the flight.

When they arrive in Los Angeles, he looks at Locke's body for a long time before knowing what he needs to do.

+

He shoots the guy shadowing Hurley in the head and finishes him off with an axe.

"What the hell, dude!?" Hurley yells, but he doesn't seem as upset as he's pretending to be. Sayid guesses he's more shocked about one of Widmore's people following him than what Sayid did.

It's getting dark soon, and since Sayid's been gone the US has started an eight o'clock curfew. Anyone outside after it is collected with the zombies, killed in their collecting trucks before being roasted by the government. "We need to get you somewhere safe. In the morning, we're getting Jack."

Hurley brings them to an apartment that he's clearly been hiding out at, but it sends all of Sayid's nerves on edge.

He manages to kill two men despite being shot with tranquilizer darts, and Sayid's last thought before passing out is that he hopes Hurley cuts off their heads.

+

Sayid comes to but pretends he's still unconscious as he listens for clues about where he is. There's a rhythmic beeping that must be a heart monitor, and the antiseptic smell can't be anything other than a hospital. Someone's in the room with him, someone who sounds too small to be Hurley as they move about the room, and he can't believe Hurley would be this stupid to bring him to a public facility with Widmore's people after them.

Whoever's in the room gets in Sayid's space, leaning in close enough that Sayid can feel the other person's breath on his face, and he reacts quickly, opening his eyes to get a stranglehold on his possible attacker. He'd snap their neck, but he doesn't know what he has available to decapitate the corpse.

He's still groggy from the sedatives, his vision blurry, but the face and the voice coming from it start to reveal themselves as familiar as fingers latch onto his, trying to ease the grip on his neck.

"Jack," Sayid gasps, releasing him automatically. "I thought you were someone trying to kill me."

"Like whoever killed Locke?" Jack asks, and his eyes are clearer than they were the last time Sayid had seen him. Which makes sense, Sayid thinks, since he's at the hospital, so Jack must be working. He watches Jack fill a glass from the sink. "Here - it'll help your body flush the lingering sedatives faster."

Sayid takes the water, grateful, and it takes the raspy edge off his voice the next time he speaks. "Where's Hurley?"

"Prison," Jack laughs, even though Sayid doesn't find it particularly funny. "He says he'll be safe there." Jack's eyes are on him as Sayid sits back down on the bed. "Did Locke find you?" Sayid nods wordlessly. "I didn't believe him, but then he died, and he's still dead."

"So you believe him now?"

"I don't know. Maybe." Jack runs a hand over his face, and Sayid can see how exhausted he is. "I have this feeling like we're supposed to go back, like everything will be better if we do."

His expression turns grim. "After you left, Sayid, this last time… things got worse. Drugs, pills - I wanted to kill myself, and Kate wasn't going to stick around and watch." Jack looks up, his eyes locking with Sayid's. "Going back to the island is one of the only things that's made sense since getting off of it."

"One of?" Sayid asks, even though he thinks he knows the answer already from the way Jack's looking at him. He feels a flare of desire that only increases when Jack pushes away from where he's leaning against a counter and joins Sayid on the hospital bed.

Sayid hopes it isn't the side effects of the tranquilizers that has him leaning into Jack, kissing him soft and uncertain because his senses are muted, and he's not sure that this is what Jack had been trying to say. Jack rotates his body, though, to change the angle, make it easier to press against each other, and the way Jack licks his tongue across and between Sayid's lips, seeking out the taste of him like Sayid's his only chance at salvation, Sayid finally realizes that he hadn't been misreading Jack at all.

Sayid's never doubted the man in his arms, and he isn't going to start now.

"We need to go back," Sayid says, feeling out the words he thought he'd never say as they roll off his tongue.

"All of us," Jack agrees. "Saving the world by doing the last thing John Locke asked of us."

+

When the plane starts to shake, Sayid sees Hurley, seated in a row halfway up the plane from them, lower the sleep mask over his eyes like he has no idea what's about to happen.

Sayid looks at Jack sitting next to him, nervous as he second guesses himself. Sayid reaches over to squeeze his hand and receives a brave smile before the turbulence has them reflexively clutching at the armrests.

Everything goes white.