Jane couldn't wait to get back home to Daria and Morgendorffer. Not only had she found several pairs of NBC suits, but she had also found instructions for setting up a clean room. They might not even need the suits!

"Huh, Morgendorffer got a new car," Jane mused aloud, noting the beaten-up blue sedan parked on the street in front of the house. She shrugged it off, parked behind it (the car blocked off the driveway, irritatingly enough), and got out, bounding towards the house.

"Lucy, I'm home!" Jane cried out with a faux-Cuban accent. "You got some 'splainin to do!"

"Jane..."

Jane turned at the voice.

"Penny?"

And so Jane had another tearful reunion with a loved one.

XXXX

Morgendorffer silently slipped away as the two Lane sisters cried, walking up the stairs to the guest room. She stopped for a moment at her old room, looking at the closed door. Thinking about it for a minute, she finally gulped and opened it.

The room was dark - not dark enough that she couldn't see the shape on the bed. Her shape. She gulped again and tentatively approached the bed.

As she reached the bed, her eyes had adjusted enough to make out the other Daria's face. It was almost funny, except for the part where she was dead.

Morgendorffer took Daria's hand. "Uh...thank you for the card. It was an unexpected gesture. I hope you can understand why I don't want to see you - you should understand, since you are ME, after all - but I wanted to offer my thanks nonetheless."

She released the hand and almost left, but then took the hand back up. "I think Jane doesn't know you can speak. You should surprise her with that sometime." A small, cunning smile briefly appeared on her face, then vanished again a moment later. Morgendorffer turned once more and this time left the room.

XXXX

"I stopped by the old house and didn't see any signs of anybody, except a few broken bones in the backyard..." Penny said, telling of what she had done in Lawndale so far.

"That would be Trent," Jane said with a sigh. "I...I didn't bury him deep enough."

Penny embraced her sister again as they both silently wept over the news. Finally, they withdrew and wiped their eyes and runny noses.

Something occured to Jane. "Where's Chiquito?" She loathed the parrot, but Penny was fond enough of him.

Penny shrugged. "I set him free once things started seriously breaking down in Honduras. I figured he'd have a better chance in the jungle with his own kind than with me."

Jane nodded. "And when did you lose your eye?"

"Mexico." Penny shuddered at the name. "I was being 'escorted' by a renegade unit from the Mexican army to a nice place they could get to know me better, when a group of zombies attacked us. One of them pulled out a grenade, but held it too long - it went off in his hand, killing him, and catching me in the face with some of the shrapnel. It was the second-worst pain I had ever felt."

"What was the worst?" Jane asked, almost afraid to know.

"When I had to cut my ruined eye out that night, and sanitize it with some booze."

Jane grimaced in horror. "Holy shit! You couldn't have found, I dunno, a doctor, or some anesthesia, or something? Holy shit!"

Penny shook her head. "By that time, nearly everybody was already dead, and all the clinics and hospitals were either looted or swarming. I was lucky to have the booze to disinfect with, to be honest."

Jane shook her head, still horrified at the tale.

"...Penny, how did you even survive the disease?" It had suddenly occured to her that nobody was supposed to be naturally immune. "You didn't come in through the attic, did you?"

"Huh?" Penny looked confused at the question. "No...I just figured that naturally-occuring immunity must have been rare...I guess it's genetic?" Penny shrugged.

"But then, Trent wouldn't have died," Jane argued. "Do you remember the feathers you sent me a few weeks before everything went to hell? Did you get sick handling them before you mailed them off?"

Penny cast her memory to back before the world ended. "Hm...actually, I do remember getting sick before sending them to you. Did you get sick off them?"

Jane nodded. "Daria thought that my immunity might have come from those feathers - and I guess she was right."

"I'm glad your friend Daria survived, Jane," Penny said, shifting the subject. "The past months have been hell alone. At least you had your best friend with you the whole time."

Jane got a pained look on her face. "Welllllll, that's kinda the truth, but things are a lot more complicated than that. You see, Penny, there's something funny about the attic of this house..."

XXXXXXXXXX

You know, I wish I wasn't too lazy to fire uo instead of just starting a new .txt file on my Desktop. If I used OpenOffice, I could do fancy tricks like italics - believe me, there are a lot of places in my fics where I would have loved to use italics, but I had to settle for plain ol' straight letters because I don't know the HTML stuff and I wasn't using Openoffice. Oh well. :(