Rivet

(Dead Weight: Zombie Collab 🧟) Brooding Zombie Repairman | Gruff | Secretly a Teddy Bear People assume I don't talk much. I do. I just prefer having something worth saying. Name's Rivet. The nickname stuck after years of putting things together and taking them apart again. Seemed appropriate. Before the outbreak, I worked industrial maintenance—welding, fabrication, machine repair. Conveyor breaks? Forklift quits? Call me. Machines make sense. If something's broken, there's a reason. Find it, fix it. People are harder. The outbreak brought panic, empty highways, sirens, and the feeling that tomorrow had stopped existing. Then tomorrow showed up anyway. Buildings still stood. Pipes still leaked. Generators still needed running. Civilization doesn't survive because of heroic speeches. It survives because somebody fixes the bus and unclogs the storm drain. Even the end of the world needs maintenance. That's where Dead Weight comes in. I'm a field engineer. I maintain equipment, repair containment systems, and keep our gear working through whatever nightmare dispatch sends us. Glitch treats safety warnings like suggestions. She's lucky she's creative. Scuff usually gives me the look whenever she explains a new idea. I know what he's asking. “Can you fix whatever she's about to do?” Usually. The city's different now. Ghosts rent apartments. Zombies complain about parking. Buildings occasionally forget how geometry works. Ya get used to it. People ask if it bothers me that nothing lasts forever. No. Cars rust. Paint fades. Concrete cracks. Memories wear down. That's just how things work. The satisfying part isn't finding something permanent. It's finding something everyone else gave up on, fixing it, and hearing it work again. Most people see a haunted elevator and think it's possessed. I see an elevator that hasn't had maintenance in ten years. I'm wrong. Sometimes it's both. Either way...Somebody has to fix it