FADE IN:

EXT. NEW YORK

JEFFREY WRIGHT (V.O.)

Hi there folks, we’re doing a zombie one this time. In this universe zombies happened because, I dunno, let’s just say “quantum” and hope that explains everything like we usually do these days.

(shrugs)

So Michael Douglas picked up a quantum virus from the quantum realm and came back and turned everybody into quantum zombies. Considering just a couple of weeks ago we had a whole episode devoted to “What If Michael Douglas Fucking Murdered All the Avengers Out of Spite”, one has to ask what exactly we have against the guy.

(pause)

Anyway, it’s Infinity War and Mark Ruffalo has just been Bifrosted to Earth.

Leaving the SANCTUM SANCTORUM to warn everybody about JOSH SWOLLEN, MARK finds the streets of NEW YORK CITY are mysteriously DESERTED!

MARK RUFFALO

Ah, doing the same “guy who’s been out of commission in some way turns up with the zombie apocalypse already in full swing” thing as 28 Days Later and The Walking Dead, are we? I guess the rushed slapdash pace of these webisodes don’t have time for anything as sophisticated as buildup or foreshadowing.

Sure enough, within seconds he encounters ZOMBIE IRON MAN and ZOMBIE DOCTOR STRANGE and ZOMBIE WONG who start ATTACKING HIM with their POWERS!

MARK RUFFALO

Wait, Robert’s in his suit? How did he get a zombie bite through hyper-advanced robot armor that can shrug off tank shells?

ZOMBERT DOWNEY, JR.

OH YOU KNOW HOW I FEEL THE NEED TO RETRACT MY HELMET ANY TIME I WANT TO QUIP OR EMOTE RAAHHHH

MARK RUFFALO

But the Benedicts are doing magic! That’s not a superpower, that’s just a very advanced skill! Exactly what sort of mindless husks are you guys? This’d be like if Cumberbatch could still perform surgery.

BENEDEAD CORPSERBATCH

LOOK WE’RE GONNA BE SLAVERING ANIMALS EXCEPT FOR RETAINING EXACTLY AS MUCH HUMAN KNOWLEDGE AS IS NEEDED TO ACCESS OUR FULL MOVESET, IT’S THE ONLY WAY TO MILK THIS PREMISE THE WAY WE WANT, JUST GET ON BOARD ALREADY BLAAARRGH

The ZOMBIES try to kill MARK who is in that HULKLESS FUNK from the MOVIE and can’t fight back! But then he is saved by THE CLOAK OF LEVITATION _{and evangeline lilly} and NOT TOM HOLLAND!

NOT TOM HOLLAND

Hi everybody! Today I’ll be voiced by a guy with the weird double-river name of Hudson Thames, who doesn’t sound remotely like Tom Holland, but if you introduce him really formally as “Thames, Hudson” his NAME kinda sounds like “Tom Holland” a little!

(frowns)

Yeah, maybe when grabbing a fistful of random-ass Marvel characters for this episode we should have stuck to the ones whose actors bothered to show up.

INT. HIDEOUT

NOT TOM and THE CLOAK _{and evangeline} bring MARK back to the rooftop SAFE HOUSE where they’ve been riding out the zombie infestation.

NOT TOM HOLLAND

Come and meet the other people on our ragtag team of survivors! We’ve got

(pulls name out of hat)

Jon Favreau, as well as

(throws dart at board)

Danai Gurira, and

(spins wheel)

Sebastian Stan, plus there’s

(rotates bingo cage, pulls out ball)

Emily Vancamp, and finally

(rolls d20, looks up encounter table)

David Dastmalchian!

EMILY VANCAMP

What a curious coincidence that every single person in this group happens to be someone vaguely connected to an Avenger, even though most of us have never met each other before!

DAVID DASTMALCHIAN

Especially since two of us don’t even have superpowers or military training, but are in fact just regular dudes!

NOT TOM HOLLAND

Allow me to get you up to speed with a really goofy and comical zombie primer video which would be in spectacularly poor taste in-universe! In it we will explain to you and the audience such zombie rules as “Zombie bites will turn you into a zombie!” and “You have to take out the zombie’s brain!”

MARK RUFFALO

Um, call me crazy but I’m pretty sure the audience doesn’t need that stuff explained to them.

NOT TOM HOLLAND

True, but they DO need the tone shattered for them with jarringly out-of-place wacky comedy! We are Marvel and we find that a VERY IMPORTANT THING TO DO.

DANAI GURIRA

At any rate, now that you’re here Mark, we’ve found a radio signal that invites everyone to a place that may have found a cure for the zombie virus. We want to get there, because a cure could finally mean an end to this nightmare.

_{EVANGELINE LILLY}

_{Well what if some of us want to opt out of this so-called cure, our civil liberties are}

DANAI GURIRA

AS I WAS SAYING, can you use your super science brain to locate the source of the signal? It happens that Not Tom’s super science brain doesn’t include the exact brand of gobbledegook needed for this.

MARK RUFFALO

(listening to signal)

Uh, that sounds like a mid-range frequency gamma shift... phase anomaly... quantum?

NOT TOM HOLLAND

Of course! We need to get to Camp Lehigh!

JON FAVREAU

Fortunately, I of course have access to Stark tech, so to help us on this perilous trek I have brought-

MARK RUFFALO

Ooh, a bunch of the heavily-armed and virtually indestructible armor which his house can autonomously fabricate, in which we’d be able to fly right across the country without encountering a single zombie?

JON FAVREAU

I was going to say “a single palm blaster”. Pew pew?

MARK RUFFALO

(sighs)

Let’s go catch a train I guess.

INT. GRAND CENTRAL STATION

The team go to hijack a TRAIN. But as they are trying to get it started, ZOMBIE HAWKEYE and ZOMBIE FALCON show up and ATTACK!

JEREMY REVENANT

BIRD-THEMED MCU HEROES REPRESENT GGRRRGRRRRGRRR

(eats Jon)

DANAI GURIRA

Okay, this is getting ridiculous. There’s got to be like eight or nine zombie Avengers maximum left across the entire Pacific Northwest, what are the odds of us running into them?

_{EVANGELINE LILLY}

_{Hey don’t worry guys remember how I used an ant swarm to instantly skeletonize Strange and Iron Man, surely I can just}

DANAI GURIRA

(chops Re-Anithony Mackie in half)

AT ANY RATE at least now we’ve eliminated the flying Avengers, so once we’ve gotten the train moving we’ll surely be clear of them!

They get the TRAIN moving and are a couple of miles out of the station when there is a THUD on the roof and then ZOMBIE CAPTAIN AMERICA bursts in!

CORPSE EVANS

MAYBE THE IDEA IS THAT I GOT ON TOP OF THE TRAIN WHILE IT WAS STOPPED AND JUST STOOD THERE FOR TEN MINUTES, IT’S PRETTY DUMB WHICHEVER WAY YOU SLICE IT SSKKKHHHH

(eats Emily)

EMILY DECOMP

FNURGH I AM GRAY AND VISIBLY ROTTING TWENTY SECONDS LATER, HOW IS THAT SUPPOSED TO WORK

SEBASTIAN STAN

Hm, I just walked in on my zombified best friend from childhood killing one of my only living allies. A lesser man might display even a tiny bit of emotion about that.

(bisects Evans)

An alternate-universe Captain America getting dispatched by being cut in half with their own shield? I suppose that’s a neat enough idea if we limit ourselves to doing it once.

DAVID DASTMALCHIAN

Alas, this attack has cost us Emily! At least the rest of us are fine.

_{EVANGELINE LILLY}

_{Actually I got nicked by zombie Emily and now I’m doomed so}

MARK RUFFALO

Yep, just one casualty, not too bad! Onwards to Camp Lehigh!

EXT. THE OUTSKIRTS OF CAMP LEHIGH

Our heroes are nearly at their destination, but then the TRAIN halts about a mile short!

DANAI GURIRA

Oh no, there’s about a million zombies surrounding the camp! How do we get there through all this?

_{EVANGELINE LILLY}

_{I could use my last moments of sapience to go giant-sized and carry you all to the}

NOT TOM HOLLAND

Why, we could just get the Cloak to carry us over one at a time.

MARK RUFFALO

Oh yeah, that’d get the job done in a couple of minutes. Glad there was a simple solution!

They all go over to the CAMP using that FOOLPROOF METHOD rather than some hypothetical method which obviously would have resulted in a SKYSCRAPER-SIZED ZOMBIE I MEAN WHAT DID YOU THINK WOULD HAPPEN.

DANAI GURIRA

Okay, so who’s in charge of this camp? Statistically speaking the chances of it being YET ANOTHER character affiliated with the Avengers are microscopic, right?

PURPAUL BETTANY

Greetings.

DANAI GURIRA

Oh for fuck’s sake.

PURPAUL BETTANY

You’ll be glad to know I have in fact found a cure for the zombie virus! It turns out that the Mind Stone emits a signal that can be used to undo the virus since it’s a mind virus, YES including the gray skin and rotting flesh, shut up. I already cured Paul Rudd, who is now a head in a jar! PAUL-THEMED MCU HEROES REPRESENT!

PAUL RUDD

Hi there guys, sorry for my grotesque appearance, it must be JARRING!

(chuckles)

Oof, shouldn’t have gone for the bad pun, huh? I know, I should have quit while I was A HEAD.

(chuckles)

Sorry, sorry! My conversation skills are a bit rusty. For a while now I’ve had NO BODY to talk to!

(chuckles)

(suddenly deadly serious)

No for real. This is the EXACT level on which my dialogue in this episode is written. They managed to get Paul Rudd to reprise the role of Ant-Man for an animated action series, and then just had him crack terrible puns the whole time. I was personally involved in the science experiment which brought the world to ruin, my mentor died and came back as a monstrous ghoul to eat me, I got revived as a disembodied head in the wreckage of a post-apocalyptic world, and as you’ll soon find out I’ve been aware of some SERIOUSLY FUCKED-UP THINGS going on a few rooms over, and yet apparently all I want to do is make a bunch of dad jokes.

(shudders)

This is it, folks! The nadir! The darkest hour! If anybody ever asks you why some people say the MCU has a tone problem, show them this episode, and they too will know the face of Death!

PURPAUL BETTANY

Carrying on, normally in this kind of story there’d be a slow build-up to the reveal that the safe haven is really a death trap, but you know how our pacing is, might as get right to it.

And so they more or less IMMEDIATELY find out that T’CHADWICK BOSEMAN IS THERE, being kept as a rapid-healing SNACK for ZOMBIE SCARLET WITCH!

T’CHADWICK BOSEMAN

(dismemberedly)

Ow ow ow why the fuck did I respond to some robot’s request that the king of Wakanda come to this random military base completely alone I mean come on owwww

PURPAUL BETTANY

That’s right, instead of going out to share my cure with the world, I’ve been using it as bait to lure humans here to get fed to my zombie girlfriend. Clearly she and I are two peas in a grieving-completely-psychotically pod.

Suddenly ELIZADEATH breaks free of her CAGE and eats DANAI and DAVID!

MARK RUFFALO

Oh no, she’s on the loose! ...Is our presence here responsible for that in some way?

PURPAUL BETTANY

Hmm, no. No I’m pretty sure she could have done that at any time. She was just behind glass after all, and she’s the Scarlet Witch. Weird she didn’t do it sooner, honestly.

(shrugs)

Anyway, I must atone for what I’ve done! So I will bring my own considerable superpowers and my detailed knowledge of how the cure works and the massive anti-zombie forcefield I generate when I have the Mind Stone plugged into my head back to Wakanda with you!

(looks into Elizadeath’s glowing red monster eyes)

Aw, I can’t walk out on my beloved. So instead of what I just said, I’ll rip the Mind Stone right out of my head and fucking die, leaving you to desperately try and escape the zombie horde which pours into the camp seconds later. That’s just as redeeming a gesture, right?

He DOES THIS, leaving MARK, SEBASTIAN, CHADWICK, and NOT TOM to flee to a JET, while the CLOAK saves PAUL RUDD’S HEAD.

PAUL RUDD

Neat, thanks for helping me es-CAPE!

(cloak drops him on the ground and leaves him)

Sound decision, I approve.

MARK RUFFALO

You guys take the jet, I’ll hulk out and clear the runway so you can get out of here! I’m sure that I’ll overcome my mental block with your lives on the line, even though in another timeline the imminent slaughter of half of all life in the galaxy wasn’t enough to do it.

MARK does in fact become HULK RUFFALO and buy them the chance to TAKE OFF and fly away!

JEFFREY WRIGHT (V.O.)

And so they took the Mind Stone and its possibilities for mankind’s salvation towards the ultra-sophisticated labs in Wakanda, and if we ended it right now we could leave things on a note of hope.

(coughs)

(twiddles thumbs)

But fuck it, we’ve gotten all we need from this universe so let’s go with another maximally bleak Everybody Dies ending. Thanos was waiting for them in Wakanda like in the movie, even though there was no Mind Stone to draw him there in the first place, and he was a zombie and we’re implying that when they got there he was able to complete the Gauntlet and lay waste to the entire universe with his mindless zombie bloodlust, the end.

(chortles)

Man, I’m such an asshole.

END.