This Rotten World

By Jacy Morris

Text Copyright © Jacy Morris 2014

All Rights Reserved

Also Available from Jacy Morris

Fiction:

The Abbey

The Children of Hamelin (Coming Soon)

 The Enemies of Our Ancestors (as The Vocabulariast)

This Rotten World

This Rotten World: Let It Burn

Unmade: A Neo-Nihilist Vampire Tale (as The Vocabulariast)

Non-Fiction:

Let's Get Drunk and Watch Horror Movies: 50 Horror Movie Reviews and Drinking Games (As The Vocabulariast)

Let's Get Drunk and Watch Horror Movies: Volume 2 (As The Vocabulariast)

Music:

All Hell Breaks Loose Soundtrack with Jeremy Brown (Available on iTunes)

Movies:

All Hell Breaks Loose (Available from Wild Eye Releasing on DVD)

The Cemetery People (Coming Soon)

Spec. Scripts:

Find my work on Inktip.com (email me at thevocabulariast@gmail.com to find out how)

Table of Contents

Also Available from Jacy Morris

Prologue

Chapter 1: Zeke

Chapter 2: Mort

Chapter 3: Rudy

Chapter 4: Teach

Chapter 5: Joan

Chapter 6: Clara

Chapter 7: Through a Garden Hose

Chapter 8: Nightsticks

Chapter 9: Dustin and Bill

Chapter 10: Code Red and Endcaps

Chapter 11: The Munchies

Chapter 12: Haldol and Bite Wounds

Chapter 13: Use Your Head

Chapter 14: Speakerphones and 12-Gauge Shotgun Shells

Chapter 16: A Total Lack of Trumpets

Chapter 17: From Worse to Worser

Chapter 18: Pop-Tarts and Paint Thinner, the Breakfast of Champions

Chapter 19: Iceman and Busy Signals

Chapter 20: Never Too Late

Chapter 21: Katie Bar the Door

Chapter 22: Making Stories

Chapter 23: Check-In Time

Chapter 24: Roasted Goat

Chapter 25: Ace is Number 1

Chapter 26: The Shopping Cart of Salvation

Chapter 27: The Mortician

Chapter 28: A Message to You Rudy

Chapter 29: Fixed-Gear Only

Chapter 30: Molly

Chapter 31: Observation

Chapter 32: Boot Camp

Chapter 33: The Last Tear

Chapter 34: Quarantined

Chapter 35: The Long Way Home

Chapter 36: This Old Cell

Chapter 37: Hot Chops

Chapter 38: Hey, Neighbor

Chapter 39: As Day Breaks

Chapter 40: On the Road

Chapter 41: The New Katie

Chapter 42: Friends and Murder

Chapter 43: Til Death Do Us Part

Chapter 44: Swords and Flames

Chapter 45: To Sleep or Not to Sleep

Chapter 46: Becoming Chaos

Chapter 47: I'd Like to Make  a Collect Call to Armageddon

Chapter 48: Move Over Rover, the Army is Taking Over

Prologue

BOOK 2:

WE ALL FALL DOWN

Chapter 1: The Dinner Bell

Chapter 2: Self-Service

Chapter 3: Pretty Big Balls

Chapter 4: Those Things'll Kill Ya

Chapter 5: A Numbers Game

Chapter 6: Getting Wheels

Chapter 7: Fortified

Chapter 8: Boardman, Oregon

Chapter 9: Rescue

Chapter 10: Safe

Chapter 11: Riverside

Chapter 12: Two to Drop Off

Chapter 13: The Dumpster of Salvation

Chapter 14: A New Band

Chapter 15: Digging In

Chapter 16: Watching the Gauges

Chapter 17: In the Coliseum

Chapter 18: Ginger Fluff

Chapter 19: Dinnertime

Chapter 20: Polite Conversation

Chapter 21: When is Check Out Time?

Chapter 22: The Last Show on Earth

Chapter 23: Droppin' Like Flies

Chapter 24: Barbarians at the Gate

Chapter 25: Take Two of These and Call Me in the Morning

Chapter 26: Killing Time

Chapter 27: Room #27

Chapter 28: Shit Buddies

Chapter 29: On Notice

Chapter 30: In the Booth

Chapter 31: On the Fence

Chapter 32: Wanted

Chapter 33: The Pied Piper of Portland

Chapter 34: Saint Bryant

Chapter 35: Into the Night

Chapter 36: Not Enough Beer to Go Around

Chapter 37: The Third Time is the Charm

Chapter 38: We All Fall Down

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Prologue

In the future:

The sun beat down upon him. Beads of sweat ran down the sides of his face. One ran down the side of his nose and perched on the edge of his upper lip. He blew the bead of sweat into the air and grunted as he pulled on the coarse rope. His hands, now callused and blistered after days on the roof, lumbered with robotic automaticity.

His mind wandered as his body engaged in actions that had essentially become second nature. He pulled on the rope some more. In the back of his mind, he registered the coarseness of the rope on the exposed parts of his hands. He had wrapped some shreds of an old shirt around his hands a few days ago, when he first began his work.

His shoulders were red from exposure to the sun. In the past, he would have worried about increasing his risk for melanoma, but not anymore. Now it was perfectly fine to smoke, drink, and sit in the sun for hours upon hours. Hand over hand, he hauled on the rope, leaving bits of skin and blood behind on the frayed, hempen strands. Finally, he hauled his prize up onto the roof, a heavy, blue bowling ball with a metallic finish, swirls upon swirls playing on its surface. It looked like a small planet sans continents. The sun lit every metallic piece of glitter embedded in its plastic. The bowling ball rested in a cradle that he had fashioned out of rope. Crimson drops of gore dripped from the bowling ball onto the loose pebbles that covered the roof of the gas station.

He looked off into the distance, wiping the sweat from his brow. His arm dropped to his side, and the sweat that he had wiped off ran down his fingers and dripped onto the roof. He flexed his aching fingers and looked at the yellow and red gas station sign. $4.19 for a gallon of gas. He had a feeling that it was actually worth a little more these days.

The man pulled a cigarette from a bag that sat on the ground next to a shiny, silver air conditioning vent. He lit the cigarette, looking at the naked lady lighter he had pulled from a house two weeks past. He wondered if he would ever see a naked lady again, a living one at least.

He dropped to the ground and leaned his back against the air conditioning vent. The heat of the flimsy metal burned his skin, but he no longer cared. He took a deep drag off of the cigarette, enjoying the burn of the smoke as it curled its way into his lungs. He looked up at the azure sky, wishing for rain. Hell, a cloud would do just fine... anything for a brief respite from the relentless sun. There was only one thin wisp of a cloud floating through the sky, a mocking wisp with a shape like nothing. He took another drag from his cigarette, and closed his eyes.

He awoke to the pain of burning on his fingers. The man tossed the cigarette across the roof and looked at his ruined digits. Red blisters and pain, exactly what he needed... more blisters and pain. He stood up, shaking off the soreness that had seeped in unbidden during his brief respite.

The man picked up the bowling ball by the rope and dangled it out over the side of the gas station roof. He peeked over the edge, already prepared for what he was about to see. Rotten faces peered up at him, scraps of flesh hanging off of their cheeks, their arms raised up to him as if they were at a concert and he was the object of their affection. But that's not how it was... he was just a meal, standing on the roof of a gas station, holding a bowling ball tied up in a rope. He swung the ball in an arc, releasing it at an angle that sent it hurtling straight down.

He watched it fall, tracking its movement. The zombie's head exploded like an egg. Instead of yellow yolk, red chunks of brain erupted from the shattered skull. He almost laughed as the now headless body fell over to the side slowly like R2-D2 after one of those little creatures blasted him with electricity in the beginning of Star Wars. He would have laughed if it weren't for the fact that two more corpses were shambling down the street, ready to take up watch at the bottom of the wall. A hundred more clawed at the rough red brick of the gas station.

Bodies littered the ground all around the squat building. The moans of the dead drifted through the air. He couldn't wait for the sun to kill him. But in the meantime... he pulled on the rope.

The sun beat down upon him. Beads of sweat ran down the sides of his face. One ran down the side of his nose and perched on the edge of his upper lip. He blew the sweat into the air and grunted as he pulled on the coarse rope. His hands, now callused and blistered after days on the roof, lumbered robotic automaticity.

Chapter 1: Zeke

Today was the day that the guns had to be cleaned. No one was making Zeke do it, but years of habit prevented him from taking it easy. Zeke was a well-adjusted veteran who had recently seen his service in the Army end. There had been no promotion in his future, so he saw no more point in wasting any more of his life. Still, the old habits died hard.

His house was a squatty, two-bedroom bungalow on the edge of Portland, Oregon's SE quadrant. He lived there alone... hence, all the guns. They weren't alive. They didn't keep him warm at night, but they gave him something to do on those nights when the past seemed to be sitting outside of his window, breathing its dusty breath.

There were so many guns because... well, he had no wife and no life outside of the military. This was a problem. For Zeke, life was not supposed to be like this. When he was a young boy, dreaming in Toledo, Ohio, he had more than once imagined that in the future he would live a picture perfect, Rockwellian existence with a standard-issue wife and several kids running around the yard to pass on his legacy. He looked at his guns. They were the closest thing to a family that he had and the only legacy he was likely to ever pass on.

His parents had died years ago, when he was only ten-years-old, after a drunk driver had run into them head-on, twisting their car and their bodies into an unrecognizable mess. He could almost remember their faces... almost. But years of dust, travel, and simplicity of emotion had left him vacant and damaged. He plucked a shotgun out of the gun locker in the corner of his living room, a SPAS-12. It was empty. Zeke knew the feeling.

Zeke sat on his couch and turned on the TV with his remote control. The flat screen sprung to life. He unscrewed the magazine extension, and slowly removed the magazine spring, making sure it didn't fly off. His hands moved easily, disassembling the fore-end and the bolt from the receiver. On the TV, the news was on. Boring feel-good stories, and little else. The weather report came up. It looked like the month of June was going to be a scorcher. It didn't bother him. He had grown used to sweltering heat over the last decade of operating overseas. Hell, he had actually grown to like the heat. 

As the "local" sports news came up, he couldn't help but laugh. Having grown up with actual sports teams on the TV, Portland's sports news always seemed rather hokey and small-town to him. They only had one team, the Trail Blazers, a perennially underperforming professional basketball team. There was also a soccer team, but no one that knew anything about sports really considered soccer an actual sport. When the Blazers weren't playing, everything circled back to Oregon's colleges, The University of Oregon and Oregon State. Were you a Duck or a Beaver? Who gives a fuck? He reassembled the SPAS and cocked it, making sure the action felt right. Everything was copacetic. He filled the magazine with shotgun shells, and then cycled them through with the pump action just to make sure.

Zeke placed the shotgun back in the gun locker, and walked to his dumpy old refrigerator, which had probably been put in right after the house had been built in the '60s. The hipsters that migrated through his neighborhood to reach Southeast Portland would have called it retro; he called it a piece of shit. The refrigerator was the only original piece of the house that still remained. It hummed along loudly, occasionally rattling as if it were about to give up the ghost, but it kept things cold, so he really had no problem with it. He pulled the dirty white door open and looked inside the fridge. Ah, a cold PBR. Nothing says "Tuesday rocks" like a cold PBR and the smell of gun oil.

He walked over to the front window of his small shitbox and peered out through the bars on the window to eye the street people. He lived on the corner of a road to nowhere that intersected with 82nd Ave... a great road if you liked crystal meth and hookers. He popped the top of his beer, and took a long swig, enjoying the burn of the beer as it travelled down his throat. There were times when he thought he ought to track down his realtor and put a bullet through his head, but then he realized it was his fault for not staking out the place on his own. One hour spent around here at night, and he would have known better than to buy a house this close to 82nd.

The night people moved at a shambling pace. Their lives were over, but they had no idea. Once you got on the meth, that's all there was to it. You might as well throw yourself from a bridge downtown. The bars on his windows were for them. A methhead would do anything to get the cash to buy another fix. They walked along, picking at their skin, missing teeth, and generally making non-junkies feel nauseated by their very existence. He had lost a shovel, a bucket, some empty beer cans, and an old coffee can full of loose screws and nails in the first week he had lived here. He learned quickly not to leave anything outside, and the bars had been his first modification to the house. He was surprised that they hadn't bothered to try and take the bars yet. The scrap metal industry was doing just fine in Portland.

The junkies weren't the only annoyance on the street. The hookers, riddled with disease and about as sexy as a vagina lined with razor blades, occasionally had their Johns park in front of his house, never for long though. The cocking of a SPAS-12 tended to soften up even the most randy of Johns. He smiled at the night, took a sip from his beer, and walked back over to his gun rack. He lifted his chrome Desert Eagle Mark XIX from the rack. Of course, if you were looking for an effective anti-Viagra, pulling the slide on your Desert Eagle would do the job just as well as the pump from a SPAS.

Deep down, he knew that it was wrong to point guns at junkies, hookers, and Johns. But that's how he had dealt with his problems for the last twenty years. The lack of institutional norms was hard to take advantage of when all you ever knew were foster homes and the Army, which for all intents and purposes was essentially a foster home for adults. He hadn't learned to talk to women in the Army. There was no "Pick-Up Lines Boot Camp" unless you counted the peacocking bullshit of the other soldiers, which was just as likely to get you slapped or beat up in real world applications. His awkward conversations could fill volumes.

As he was reassembling his Desert Eagle, he heard a scream outside. "Fucking hookers," he thought to himself. He pressed against the barrel, holding the barrel assembly against the frame of the gun. He swung the barrel lock into closed position, and cocked and released the hammer to make sure it was working correctly. He slapped a magazine home and cocked the gun, rushing out the door, the cold, steel tang of adventure dancing on the tip of his tongue.

Chapter 2: Mort

Mort tossed and turned under the Interstate Bridge. The chill of the evening had snuck up on him, leeching into his bones. He had gotten so comfortable sleeping without a blanket in the last two weeks, the first days of summer weather, that he hadn't needed his blanket. He could hear others in the night, coughing while the fire in the rusty oil drum guttered weakly, putting out barely any heat. The cars roared down the highway a hundred feet above them. He had often imagined what would happen if there were an earthquake while he was sleeping underneath the bridge. He pictured tons of concrete breaking away and burying him amidst cars, rebar, and empty whiskey pints. No one would even know to look for them.

He snorted in, inhaling the fragrant musk of his own facial hair which was marbled with gray. He felt ripe. Maybe it was time to take himself down to the fountain and get himself a bath, but not tonight; it was too cold. Mort flinched as another person in the camp coughed, a rattling, phlegmy bit of business that didn't help him sleep any. His teeth began to chatter.

He sat up and blinked his eyes, the rods and cones taking their time to adjust to the gloom under the highway. Ivy flowed down a steep hillside and a pillar of solid concrete, twenty feet in diameter shot up into the sky where it met with the underside of the freeway. The freeway rattled and roared as a semi-truck bounced across its rutted structure. Mort hugged himself tightly and rubbed his arms, trying to warm them up.

The ground was soft and dirty, but the cardboard he had been sleeping on was fresh, and in good shape. Still, the chill of the ground had crept up through its limited insulation. It felt like it was 50 degrees out... a low-number for the beginning of June. His blanket was stashed away in his shopping cart, where it lay untouched for the last two weeks. His shopping cart rested against the concrete pillar. He got to his feet, fighting pins and needles in his left foot. He limped across the homeless camp, stepping over bearded bodies and broken glass.

Mort reached his shopping cart, a rusted old gentleman that had been with him for two years. He wasn't even sure the store he had stolen it from was still in existence. It was a skinny cart, in good working order, and piled high with everything that he owned. Some bits of clothing here and there, a spare set of shoes, odds and ends, and his trusty street blanket... impervious to moisture, totally camouflaged, and utterly priceless. He began shifting his belongings, trying not to make too much noise. The blue tarp on top crinkled loudly as he peeled it back.

"Shut up, Mort! I'm trying to sleep over here."

"Sorry," he hissed back, trying not to disturb anyone else.

Mort reached into his pocket and pulled out a cigarette, a hand-rolled smoke made with the cheapest tobacco one could buy. He twirled it in his brown fingers while he searched in the pocket of his jeans for a pack of matches. He found it, placed the cigarette in his mouth, struck a match and inhaled. It stung his throat and clung to the coarse hairs of his mustache, its rich smoke infusing the evening with an earthy quality.

He leaned against the concrete pillar, his head tilted back. The underside of the freeway was no attractive thing, just piles of metal and concrete all laced together, but it made him think. He wondered if it was time to move on. As the cars zoomed down the highway, he felt it in his bones, the call of freedom and the open road. He wasn't homeless because of a drug problem, a prison record, or mental illness. He was homeless because of his addiction to freedom. Sure, life was harder without a home address, but it was also purer, and when he was tired of one place, all he had to do was stick out his thumb and ride the highways to the next place. He didn't have to turn off the cable, change his bills over, or let anyone know. All he had to do was pack up the shit he wanted and hoof it down to the nearest trainyard. He snuffed out his cigarette amid thoughts of the future. It was decided; he would head east, maybe to Idaho or Montana while the weather was still good.

He went back to trying to pull his blanket from his cart. He tugged on the blanket, trying to make as little noise as possible, but it wouldn't come free. Without warning, a pair of clammy hands wrapped around his throat.

Chapter 3: Rudy

Rudy pulled the pin on the grenade. He calmly cooked it for three seconds and then threw it into the middle of the group. It exploded, sending showers of gore everywhere. He laughed into his mic as the players he had killed all shouted expletives at him, many containing racist terms or questioning his sexuality. One guy called him a "cocktoucher." That was a good one. He'd file that one away in his memory bank for the next time someone bested him at COD, or Call of Duty as the noobs liked to call it.

Of course, that probably wouldn't be for a while. He hadn't been handily defeated in quite some time. It wasn't that he was good. It was that he was patient. While most players ran around looking to get their heads blown off, Rudy always managed to find a place, set up traps to cover his ass, and then slowly pick people off. A thirty second lull in the action was no big deal to him, but to most players, it was enough to send them sprinting off into cyberspace to get their digital bits blown off.

People hated Rudy, both in real life and the video game world. They didn't hate him because he was good at video games or a genius in general... it was the fact that he knew it and didn't let people forget it. He had grown up without any real role models in foster homes for most of his life. As Rudy figured it, a kid facing the odds that he had faced had a right to brag a little bit. Yeah, Rudy may not have parents, but he could come up with an algebraic expression that would map out the probability of your future, right down to your employer and how many pounds you'd weigh. Ok... so maybe that was an exaggeration, but if you asked Rudy if he could do it, he would more than likely say yes. It was his confidence along with his ability that had landed him a full scholarship to Portland State University.

"Have fun sucking dicks, boys." Rudy triggered his weapon of mass destruction, laughed, and left the lobby. The competition had been too easy for him. He removed his three-hundred dollar Turtle Beach headphones, put his controller on his rickety coffee table, and walked into the small kitchenette of his apartment to grab a 20 oz. bottle of ass-kicking fuel... in this case, Mountain Dew: Code Red.

He slammed the door shut in frustration. For as smart as he was, Rudy, in many ways, was still a child emotionally. He was also prone to forgetting things. In this case, he had forgotten to stock up on Code Red. Rudy looked at the clock, adjusted the glasses on his freckled face, and decided to walk up to the store. It was the weekend, and there were plenty of gaming hours to burn. He looked at the water tap in his kitchen, contemplating whether he should pour himself a glass of water and keep going. "Fuck that," he said out loud to himself.

            Rudy walked into his bedroom, and peeled a gray, hooded sweatshirt out of a dirty pile of clothing. He gave it a good sniff, and then slipped it on over his head after deciding it smelled "good enough," which is single-person code for "No one is going to get close enough to me for it to matter." Rudy grabbed his wallet and keys from the top of his dresser and headed out the door.

He huffed down the stairs, enjoying the silence of the building. If only he could limit his time out in the real world to the time between 1:30 and 5 o'clock in the morning, then he would be happy. All those annoying people tucked snugly in their beds, no lines to stand in, nothing but cool air, silence, and a complete lack of human interaction... unless you counted talking to convenience store clerks as human interaction. He did not.

Rudy pulled his phone from his pocket, and pulled up his new favorite game. He loved the game's angles, math, and predictability. He shambled through the lobby, oblivious to his surroundings. If he had looked up, he would have seen the trail of blood that led into the security office. Instead, he flung a bird dressed up like Luke Skywalker across the screen of his phone with the flick of his finger, while he wondered if Luke Skywalker could use the force to bring himself a bottle of Code Red from his apartment.

Chapter 4: Teach

The napkin around the base of his beer was soaked with brew. The bartender seemed to have a difficult time pouring a glass of beer without getting as much on the outside of the glass as he did on the inside. Teach reached for the glass and upended it, letting the cold foamy liquid wash over the scar tissue where his tonsils had been. The night was young, school was over, and he had no papers to grade the next day. Now if he could only manage to pay for some air conditioning in his house, then life would be perfect.

He supposed his wife and ten-year-old son were fast asleep at home. For a brief second, he felt a pang of guilt. One night a month at the bar wasn’t too much to ask he supposed. As he finished the last drop of his beer, he smacked his lips and ordered another.

The bartender, either lazy, a simpleton, or both attempted to pour another beer. He watched as the lanky dude set the glass under the tap, opened it fully and allowed foam to pile up. He tipped the glass and spilled foam out into the drain underneath the taps. So much beer wasted… it’s as if he had never learned to pour a beer in his life. After three more cycles of alcohol abuse, the bartender spun around and set the beer on his napkin, which was probably more beer than paper at that point.

“Here you go, Teach.”

Everyone called him Teach. That’s what people did when you were a teacher, and Teach was as teachery a teacher as ever there was. His life was educating kids. He had never even dreamed of getting another job, not even when his classes had swelled to forty kids per class. At five classes a day, that was 200 hundred names to memorize. It kept his brain sharp, and while his life was overly full during the school year, when the summer hit, the blissfully empty days more than made up for the aggravation of excessively involved parents, poorly prescribed curriculum, and kids who would simply never amount to anything.

Teach fished a handful of dollar bills out of his pocket and handed them to the man. Brown foam floated on top of black liquid. The foam only made up a third of the beer, so he made sure to hand the man an extra one-dollar bill as a tip. Maybe he could buy some beer-pouring lessons with the money.

It was the last of his cash, so he stared lazily at the beer on the counter, making it last as long as he could. Once his cash ran out, he would head home. That was his rule, and he followed it religiously. Teach watched the foamy bubbles burst and disappear, imagining that each bubble made a barely audible pop as it burst.

He spun around on the chair, and admired the bar. Its emptiness was vast, and the quiet was something special. The Sleazy Goat had definitely seen better days, although he didn’t know when. As long as he had been frequenting the joint, there were only ever a handful of people sitting around in its faded, orange vinyl seats, sipping beers at scratched, wooden tables propped level with piles of matchbooks. Old beer promos covered every inch of available space, with the exception of the bar and the tables. It was if the owner never said "no," and never took anything down. The Corona poster in the corner looked as if it were from the '70s.

Teach leaned back on the stool and looked at the ceiling. A stuffed goat head. the namesake of the bar, hung on the wall. It didn't look sleazy, but it definitely looked dirty. Dust covered its face and hung from its scraggly beard. It was a sad way for an animal to end up.

Teach raised the glass of stout to his lips and sucked in a mouthful of foam. Maybe he’d be lucky enough to score some of that velvety, caramel-flavored stout the next time around. "If it ain't stout, get the fuck out," he muttered to himself.

A haggard old man walked into the bar, shot Teach a half-assed salute and sat down on one of the cracked, pleather stools at the bar. Teach had seen the man before. He might have even talked to him. It was hard to tell. He only ever allowed himself one night at the bar a month, and hardcore alcoholics all tended to wind up looking the same after a while, ruddy faces, excessive wrinkles, and that look in their eyes that seemed to say, “My god, when is the world going to end?”

Teach knew that if it weren’t for his beautiful wife and kid at home, he would probably look much the same. He supposed the people at the bar simply didn’t have anything that great to live for.

Teach lifted his glass, and as the cool, black liquid touched his lips, the door burst open. He closed his eyes and enjoyed the thick refreshment of the stout. He set the glass on the bar and wiped some residual foam off of his upper lip with the back of his hand. As he went to let out his customary “ahh” of approval, a pair of feverish hands wrapped their fingers around his throat.

Teach was wrestled off the stool. He couldn't see who was attacking him, and somehow, this made everything worse. Teach panicked and tried to scream, but he couldn’t force enough air out of his lungs to make a sound. Panic welled up in him as he tried to scream. A sharp pain shot through his shoulder. At first, there was a sensation of intense pressure, as if he was being pinched, and then the pressure was gone, replaced by the white-hot burning of exposed nerve endings. Hot blood ran from a ragged bite wound along the upper part of his trapezius.

“Help him!” yelled the old man. Teach heard shattering as the bartender vaulted over the bar, knocking pint glasses to the ground. The bartender struggled with his attacker, and for a brief second, the hands that were wrapped around his throat let go, and he sucked breath through his ragged and barely functioning windpipe. He rolled out of the way, and got to his feet unsteadily to finally lay eyes on his attacker.

It was a skinny man, unremarkable but for the chunk of Teach’s shoulder hanging out of his mouth. Teach's stomach flipped as he watched the young man slowly chewing on what had formerly been a part of his body. He was perhaps in his twenties, clad in faded jeans and a plain white T-shirt that might be a little too short for him. The bartender had one arm wrapped around the man’s throat. He could hear the skinny man's breath rasping in his throat as he struggled to breathe..

“Help me!” the bartender yelled, struggling to subdue the man.

Teach ran over to help the bartender. Every movement sent fire rushing along his shoulder, the nerve endings awash in pain and blood. He helped the bartender push the man face-first onto the ground.

“Jesus Christ,” the old man muttered. “Is he on PCP?”

“His body feels like it’s on fire,” the bartender replied.

The bartender put his knee on the back of the man, whose only response was to gnash his teeth and struggle harder.

Teach circled behind the bar, “I’m calling the cops.” As he reached for the phone, the young man in the jeans knocked the bartender off of him and rushed for the old man. The old man’s feeble attempt at escape merely ended up with him on the floor, his legs tangled in the legs of the stool that he had been sitting on. The young man pounced on him, and took a bite out the man’s throat.

It wasn’t like in the movies. They rarely accounted for the durability and elasticity of human skin. The first bite that the old man endured looked painful as hell, and the shriek he let out was an uncivilized thing. The man in the jeans jerked his head violently back and forth until he actually managed to pull the flesh free from the man’s throat. The old man's scream turned into a ragged gurgling as his arms and legs flailed upon the filthy carpet. Teach noticed for the first time that it was green... an odd thing to notice considering the circumstances.

The bartender stood in shock as the old man’s blood squirted across the bar. The next squirt wasn’t nearly as strong. Without thinking, Teach ripped the phone out of the wall and charged the young man in the jeans. It wasn't an effective weapon, but it did the job. When he was done, the phone dripped gore, and the young man twitched on the ground.

The bartender squatted next to the old man. The blood was no longer squirting out of his throat; it merely dribbled. “I think he’s dead, Teach.”

Teach stood up, walked over to his beer, and drained it in one go. “Yeah, well, it looks like they both are. You got a cell phone? I seem to have ripped your landline right out of the wall?”

The blood on his shirt had cooled, but a warmth still ran through his body. He didn’t know if it was shock, the beer, or the fact that he had just killed somebody who was trying to take his life, but he welcomed it.

Chapter 5: Joan

Her phone rang at 2 A.M. Being on call was literally the worst thing that had ever happened to her... yet.  There she had been dreaming about swimming in warm ocean water as blue as a Smurf's bottom while shirtless guys waded through the surf to bring her colorful drinks in hollowed-out coconuts, then blam! That damn phone goes off, causing her to sit bolt upright and sending her cat flying through her apartment, but not before it could dig two painful furrows in the flesh of her legs. And for what? To go help the dumbest and the lowest that Portland had to offer. At 2 A.M. you were always dealing with one of three things... some dumbass with something stuffed up their ass, some dumbass who had gotten too drunk or high, or the poor bastard that had been run over by someone who had gotten too drunk or high... occasionally they had something stuffed up their ass as well.

She shrugged into her white doctor's coat and looked at herself in the mirror. It was going to have to be a ponytail day. Joan quickly brushed her teeth, spitting mouthfuls of old, dead bacteria into the sink and watching them whisk away down the drain to a place where no one ever had to pull a grapefruit out of someone's asshole. She had learned long ago that there's absolutely no reason to look nice when one was working late at night at the hospital. You didn't want to look pretty for some of the trash that walked into the place in the dead of morning. She plopped some wet food into her cat's dish and walked out of the door, keys jangling and brown ponytail bobbing back and forth.

Her drive through the city was peaceful. 2:30 in the morning wasn't bad if you wanted to get somewhere. The night was cool, and the heat of the day had faded into a crisp, almost autumnish feel. But autumn was still a few months away. In the meantime, it was time to help stupid people who had maimed themselves in one way or another. It was the time of barbecue accidents, fireworks injuries, and rashes caused by the shaving of pubic hair, which people inevitably thought might be herpes. It was a glorious time to be a doctor. As soon as she walked in the door, she was inundated with a never-ending parade of dumbass.

Her first patient was drunk and burned. The man, who was wearing a Portland Timbers jersey, had a second degree burn on his arm. In addition to the burn he no longer had eyebrows and half his mustache was missing.

"Alright, what happened?" she asked.

"The barbecue..." he started. Then, having lost his train of thought, he merely made a noise imitating an explosion and then giggled a bit. She straightened him up when he began to lean perilously to the side, as if he were going to pass out. He was in a daze mostly as she put the dressing on his arm, which was probably a good thing for him, as the pain most likely would have required some sort of sedative had he not already been three sheets to the wind. When she was finished, she left him where he was, and told the R.N. to find him a room, so he could be re-examined again later.

The next person she saw wasn't much better off, but at least she wasn't drunk. She was just so ill that she had no idea what was really going on. She was an older lady, her hair white and curly, the fine gray down on her lips shone underneath the fluorescent lights, slick with her own mucus. Her husband stood off to the side, wringing his hands in a concerned manner. As she was examining the woman, who was clad only in a stained nightgown that clung to her sweaty body, she leaned to the side and deposited some bile on the floor.

Down the hall, she could hear a commotion building. She heard the shattering of glass and muted yelling and thought, "Great... another junkie." As she installed an I.V. on the patient in front of her, she had no idea how wrong she was.

Chapter 6: Clara

The walls dripped moisture. The hot breath of the packed concert hall's sweaty patrons clung to her own sticky body. The music thumped, vibrating through the air and her body as she ran through the circle, pumping her fist and screaming along with the music.

Clara should be sleeping, or at the very least, dead tired. Tuesday night was not the time to be out at a punk rock show. She thought she had left that phase of her life behind her when she had been accepted into graduate school. She should be at home, in bed, dreaming of case files and precedents, and bar exams. Instead, she was in this crappy dive, sweating away her evening, her white wifebeater clinging to her ribs and breasts.

But what are you going to do?  When Electric Fever, the quirkiest, cultiest, Japanese punk rock band that ever existed suddenly shows up in town, you drop whatever the hell you're doing and get your ass to the show.

Things wouldn't be so bad if Electric Fever hadn't been exactly what they were, snotty, self-involved cokeheads with a complete lack of regard for their fans. Clara supposed you could afford to be that way if you only ever toured once or twice every four years. She had showed up at 11 with her boyfriend Courtney, hoping to sneak in, down a few drinks, and catch Electric Fever's set, but when she had showed up, the first opening band was only just hitting the stage.

They were a lackluster local act; the type of band that only played gigs in local venues because they couldn't afford to call in sick to their day jobs the following morning. Clara and Courtney listened to one song; they were thoroughly unimpressed, so they walked up to the bar, ordered some PBR's, and stood there sipping them while trying to have a conversation, which was nearly impossible amid the eardrum-splitting feedback blasting out of the clubs speakers. The club was relatively new and had the smell of "soon to close" all over it. That's the way clubs were in the city; here one week and gone the next.

When Electric Fever had finally hit the stage, after three more forgettable punk rock acts, they were just as billed. The lead singer had stormed onto stage, chugged a beer, and then threw the empty can at his adoring fanbase, all while giving the middle finger to the crowd. His name was Ace Fever, the coolest Japanese man that had ever existed. It was a wonder how he was still alive. Behind him, Hey Fever, the drummer, and Jungle Fever, the bass player entered in matching leather outfits. The studs and buckles glittered underneath the multicolored lights that hung over the stage and turned mere mortals into momentary gods.

The crowd had surged forward, and they hadn't even played a note yet. Ace Fever stood on the stage, regarding the crowd from behind his dark sunglasses, his arms crossed. With his left arm, he slowly reached for the microphone, and when his fingertips touched the mic, Electric Fever sprung into action, assaulting the audience with a barrage of unintelligible distortion, screaming Japanese, and electric guitar fury. Flames shot out of Ace's mic stand and the room began to naturally spin in a fury of twisted limbs and energy as a circle pit turned the middle of the dance floor into a sweat-slicked meat grinder. She loved every second of it, even if she had no idea what the band was saying. It was actually better that way. There were no words to get hung up on, no meanings to ponder. There was just fury and feedback.

Clara's boyfriend Courtney loved it every bit as much as her. He was a little rough around the edges, and he still hadn't warmed up to dating a potential lawyer, but when you had been going out as long as they had, you overlooked the fact that one of you had turned into a sellout. Her hair was a natural color now, for the first time in years, a cocoa brown. She had taken all of the metal out of her face, and she was thankful that Courtney had talked her out of getting her ears gauged years ago, or else she'd be sporting big floppy earlobes.

She smiled as she caught a glimpse of Courtney spinning on the other side of the pit, his eyes feverish with joy. Suddenly, a face appeared in front of her. It had red-rimmed eyes, snarled like Billy Idol, and didn't seem quite right. She shoved the man away, and sped along on her own route, counterclockwise, always counterclockwise.

She tripped over the shoe of one of the people lurking on the edge of the circle. Clara's effort to catch her balance went for naught when her foot slipped on the beer-slick dance floor. Her ankle twisted outward, and she felt a pop. She went sprawling to the ground, not even noticing the burn of the knee she scraped on the laminate floor due to the intense pain in her ankle. The hands of the people in the pit pulled her to her feet and ushered her off to the side. She leaned on the shoulder of a stranger, grimacing in pain; she turned around to see Courtney struggling with the man that she had shoved away in the pit.

From her vantage point, she could see that the man didn't belong here. His flannel shirt and camouflage hat had the reek of hillbilly about them. She moved to help Courtney, but her first step was one of agonizing pain. Her ankle simply wasn't working right.

All she could do was scream and point as the hillbilly sunk his teeth into the side of Courtney's face. Courtney lashed out at the man, punching him in the jaw with his fists. The hillbilly pulled back, taking a bite of Courtney's cheek with him. The fury of the pit had stopped, and Electric Fever, noticing the oddity of a still pit, stopped playing.

Courtney stumbled backwards, his hand held to his face. "What the fuck?" Blood seeped through his fingers, as the lights overhead continued to display an alarming array of different colors. First his blood was black, then it was blue, then it was yellow. The hillbilly stood at the edge of the pit, chewing, and seemingly lost in the process.

Ace Fever sauntered across the open space, his microphone clutched in his hands, the crowd watching with anticipation. In broken English, he challenged the hillbilly, "You want to fight? You fucker fight me!" He stood at the ready, and finally the hillbilly's eyes seemed to focus on him. It shambled towards him, and Ace backhanded the man across the face, whipping the man's head to the side and knocking his camouflage hat to the ground. But he kept coming. Ace took another swing at the man, and slipped on some blood in the process. His punch hit the man in the shoulder, and had about as much effect as an ant sassing god. The man grabbed Ace in a bear hug and pulled him close. His mouth opened wide, and he bit into the chest of Ace. Ace screamed and struggled to get away from the hillbilly, but all of his 130 pounds wasn't enough to break free of the grasp of the man.

Jungle Fever broke his bass guitar over the head of the hillbilly, and that's when all hell broke loose in the club. Clara didn't see the rest of what happened, but she crawled to where Courtney was holding his face. Together, they helped each other to their feet, and then pushed their way outside, through drunken and riotous punks and away from the unbridled violence in the club. A bouncer brushed past them, but she doubted that he would be able to stop the violence.

"Are you okay?" Clara asked. The ringing in her ears and the buzz of the alcohol had her head swimming, and she felt as if she was going to faint. But she didn't... because, as she always liked to put it, fainting is for pussies.

Courtney shook his head, and tried to focus his eyes before he spoke. "Yeah, I think so. Jesus Christ. What the fuck was that? Did you see that guy?"

"Did you do something to him?"

Courtney shook his head a little more, still trying to focus, "No, he just grabbed me and took a bite out of my fucking face. How is it?"

He removed his tattooed hand from his face and exposed the raw wound, which was still bleeding profusely. Sweat covered his forehead, and steam rose from the blood on his face as it met the night air.

"Well, you're lucky you're good in bed, because that is going to be one nasty scar. C'mon, we better get you to the hospital. That guy might have had rabies or something."

Chapter 7: Through a Garden Hose

Zeke snuck up on the car from behind, secretly hoping that maybe he'd catch a peek of something, maybe a tit or two. It was always practical to sneak up on a car from the rear, and as an added bonus he might just catch a quick visual snatch of flesh, which wouldn't be a terrible thing.

The car was an '80s model station wagon. The fenders were rusted out, which was hard to see due to the car's classy copper paintjob, which was only made classier by the wood paneling on the side. He laughed inside as he wondered what moron thought it would be a good idea to put fake wood paneling on the side of a car.

He moved slowly, squatting down with his gun at the ready. He flinched as the car rocked violently. They must really be going at it, he thought. Zeke crept up the passenger side of the car, heel to toe. He could hear the wet, slopping sounds of intimacy from the cracked window of the passenger side. From all of the slurping noises, he bet the whore could suck a golf ball through a garden hose. There was definitely a chance that he was going to see something.

As the passenger seat came into view, he caught sight of a large pair of lily white buttocks. The smile that had crept onto his face disappeared, when he caught site of some crimson. The hooker wasn't having sex at all. She was literally eating the man. Facedown in his guts, she wouldn't have even known he was there if a single word hadn't slipped from his mouth like the secrets of a two-year-old. "Jesus."

The sound caught the hooker's attention, and she swung around, quicker than he would have expected. Her face bashed into the window of the station wagon, smearing blood all over the glass. Zeke flinched backwards, unsure of what to do for the first time in his life. If this had been enemy territory, there wouldn't be any questioning at all... simply a corpse with a bullet in her head, but this wasn't over there. This was home.

The woman bashed her face into the window again and stuck her fingers out the tiny crack of the window. She was frantic. She spit and slobbered in her efforts to get at him. He leveled his Desert Eagle at her, but didn't pull the trigger. "Stay right there," he commanded weakly. "Stay right there!" he said again with a little of that boot camp authority that had made him so popular in the army.

She didn't listen. Civilians never listened. In reply she reared back and smashed her face through the passenger side window, sending safety glass pattering to the ground. His finger tensed on the trigger, but he didn't pull it. Instead he backed away as the hooker began crawling out of the passenger seat, a shard of glass sticking out of her eye. She fell to the ground awkwardly, and he heard a crack as a piece of bone jutted out of her right arm.

"Bath salts. That's what this is. This bitch is on bath salts."

The woman stood up, unconcerned about the blood that was spurting out of her arm or her damaged eye. "Stay where you fucking are, or I'm going to shoot you in the face!" he yelled. She didn't even seem to hear him. In reply, she raised her good arm in his direction and stumbled toward him. She tried to raise her broken arm, and she was successful... at least halfway. The lower half of her arm dangled down limply just below her elbow.

That was enough for Zeke. He squeezed the trigger, and sent a round through the woman's knee. For a second, it seemed like the bullet had no effect, but when she took her next shambling step, the knee crumpled and she fell over on her side. Zeke backed up even more, and tripped over the only thing in his yard that no one had bothered to steal, an old garden gnome that had travelled with him wherever he went.

He cracked his head against the bottom step of his porch, and his vision swam in front of him. Comet trails and floaters tried to block the vision of the hooker crawling toward him, but he could barely make out her outstretched arm reaching for his foot. He attempted to lift the Desert Eagle and fire a round through the woman's head, but the world was spinning, and his shot went wide. He closed his eyes for a second, and tried to blink away the comet trails. He felt the pressure of the woman using his foot for leverage, and then he felt something else.

When he opened his eyes again, the hooker was gnawing on the end of his boot. He raised the Desert Eagle, closed one eye, which seemed to help, and then squeezed the trigger once more. The hair on the back of the woman's head jerked quickly, and then blood began to spill out of the bullet-sized hole in her forehead.

Zeke dropped the Desert Eagle in relief and tried to regain his equilibrium. His head still spinning, he kicked the woman off of his foot and pushed her to the side. He heard sirens in the night, and he knew that one of his neighbors had finally called the police. With relief, he relaxed and rested his head on the step of his porch. Before he dozed off, the last words he thought were "through a garden hose."

Chapter 8: Nightsticks

Mort staggered under the Interstate Bridge. He was spun around, only to see the bane of every homeless man's existence. The cop in front of him reached for his belt and pulled out his nightstick, a quick flick of his wrist sent Mort to the ground clutching at his knee. Mort sucked air in through his teeth.

"Get up." The officer pulled him to his feet, and then threw him back down on the ground. Mort wished the cop would make up his mind. The cop kicked over his cart, and Mort decided his best option would be to pull a "deer in the headlights" maneuver and lie completely still. From off to his right, he heard the pained groans of one of his friends. It sounded like his cop buddy had a partner.

"You can't sleep under the bridge. Get your lazy ass up, and get the fuck out of here," yelled the partner's voice.

Mort decided he would take one for the team. "Run!" he bellowed. His voice echoed underneath the overpass, and his cry of "run" was repeated throughout the clearing, picked up by the dozen or so homeless men who camped nightly under the overpass. While the cops watched his friends run off into the night, Mort attempted to crawl away. He didn't think his knee was broken, but it certainly wasn't going to be operating at a normal level for a while. Just as he reached the edge of the clearing, the cop that had thrown him to the ground whacked him across the back with his nightstick. He rolled over on his back and put his arm up to ward off another blow.

The cop, a pudgy, pink-faced man whose uniform strained at the buttons, raised his arm above his head to deliver another blow. In the dull glare of the streetlights, Mort saw a figure charge the officer from behind and knock him to the ground.

Mort scrambled to his feet and rubbed his knee. "Thanks," he muttered to his savior as he began to run away.

The man was familiar to him, but he didn't reply. He believed everyone called the guy Dirty Kurt. His fingers were always stained as if he had been scratching in his ass, and he had the most unpleasant odor of any homeless person he had ever had the pleasure of meeting, and he had met a lot of them.

As Mort turned his back and hobbled away, he heard the cop begin screaming wildly. He turned around briefly to see Dirty Kurt biting on the hand of the cop that had been giving him a beating. The cop's partner appeared and began clubbing the homeless man on the back. Dirty Kurt fell to the side, and the two cops began pummeling him. Mort should have left then, but something didn't quite seem right. Dirty Kurt made no move to defend himself. Every time he was hit, he just got back up again, gnashing his teeth and reaching for the cops.

Mort couldn't just walk away; Dirty Kurt had saved him. The least he could do was take a little of the punishment so it wasn't two on one. He hurried back as quick as he could. When he got close enough, he yelled, "Hey, asshole. Why don't you try that with me?"

The pink-faced cop's partner turned to look at him. He had a weasel-ish look about him, and he sneered right at Mort as he fixed his grip on his nightstick. "You want some too? You should have crawled back into the sewer while you had the chance."

Weasel walked towards him, but was stopped when Dirty Kurt grabbed him by the ankle. Dirty Kurt sank what was left of his teeth into the thigh of the cop. The cop screamed and shoved at Dirty Kurt's face with his free hand, while his pink-faced partner whacked Kurt a few times more. The cop that was being attacked fell to the ground, and Kurt immediately began crawling up the cop's prone body, scratching and pummeling him in the process.

Pink-face tried to pull him off, but Dirty Kurt wouldn't budge. He began gnashing his yellow teeth, and biting at the cop on the ground. Without hesitation, Mort moved to help the cop get Dirty Kurt off of the man. There was clearly something wrong with Kurt, more than just your classic anti-authoritarian violence.

"Easy there, Kurt. Let him go, man."

With the help of the other officer, they pulled Kurt off the cop. Weasel got up off the ground, and checked on his bites and scrapes while his partner held Dirty Kurt on the ground. Weasel gave Dirty Kurt a kick in the ribs. It didn't seem to bother him.

"C'mon, man. You ain't got to do that," Mort pleaded.

Weasel waved a finger in his face and said, "You shut your goddamn mouth. What the fuck are you guys on down here anyway?"

Pink-face ignored the questioning and said, "Help me out here, Dave. Let's get this guy cuffed. He's giving me the fucking creeps."

Weasel and Pink-face managed to cuff Dirty Kurt's hands behind him, but he was still too much to handle. While they began the process of cuffing his legs, Mort tried to wander off discretely. Weasel hadn't forgot about him. "You stand right there, old timer. We got some questions for you."

He did what he was told. It's not like he could have escaped on foot. His knee was swelling up quickly, and he knew he would be limping for a week or two.

Weasel and Pink-face had Dirty Kurt bound like a calf, his hands behind his back and cuffed to his feet. They picked him up like a suitcase and attempted to drag him to the police car. When he started gnashing his teeth and foaming at the mouth, they dropped him on his stomach, and Pink-face went to the back of the car, popped the trunk, and produced a nylon mesh hood, which they quickly cinched over Dirty Kurt's head.

They picked him up once more and placed him in the back of the car. Weasel turned to Mort and said, "You're next."

Mort looked at the man as if he were crazy. "You must be out of your mind if you think I'm going to sit back there with that man!"

Pink-face placed his hand on the butt of his nightstick. Mort looked at him, and he knew there was no getting out of it.

Weasel put a restraining hand on Pink-face and said to Mort, "Do yourself a favor and just get in the back before we have to put you back there. I appreciate your help, so why don't you just let me be nice to you? Huh? Save us all some trouble here, pal."

Mort walked over to the back of the police car as Weasel opened the door. Dirty Kurt was still struggling in the back seat, and he showed no sign of tiring. Mort plopped down in the back as Weasel slammed the door behind him.

As the two police officers got in the car, he studied the bites on their necks, shallow but bloody. All he wanted to do was get booked and get a good night's sleep. Mort looked at Dirty Kurt and silently hoped that they didn't have to share a cell together.

Chapter 9: Dustin and Bill

Dustin hung up the phone. The police were on the way. He thought about calling the owner of the bar, an abusive Chinese man who treated his employees like shit, but then figured against it. It didn't really matter to Dustin; tonight was definitely his last night slingin' suds behind the bar of The Sleazy Goat.

He looked at the puddle of blood surrounding the old man on the floor. What a shame. He had seen the man in here plenty of times, drinking until close, but he had never quite remembered the man's name because he had always paid with cash. Oh well, it wasn't his problem anymore. He just wanted the police to show up and take his statement so he could get the hell out of there.

After stepping over the dead young man on the floor, Dustin hopped over the counter, his beat up, old Chuck Taylor's squeaking on the lacquered wood of the bar. He grabbed a pint glass and poured himself a beer, which was at least half foam. As he turned around, Dustin noticed two things... Teach was missing and the old man was sitting at the bar looking at him. The old man's gray windbreaker was soaked in blood and his eyes were vapid. A thin streamer of bloody drool dripped from his mouth and slowly made contact with the bar, where it began to coil like a snake.

Dustin's stomach flipped at the site. "Hey, are you alright?" The old man just looked straight ahead, his head bobbing side to side like a cobra being charmed by a snake charmer. Dustin followed the old man's eyes to see what he was staring at. Apparently, he was being mesmerized by his own image in the mirror behind the bar. Dustin raised his glass to his lips, and drained the entire beer, though it stung his throat to do so.

When he belched, everything changed. The old man's gaze shifted from the mirror behind the bar to Dustin's face. A primal scream erupted from his bloody maw. Dustin, startled by the unexpected yell dropped the pint glass. The old man began climbing over the bar, leaving one of his dusty old tennis shoes behind in the process.

"Easy, man. I already called the cops. They're on their way."

The old man didn't appear to hear him, or if he did, he didn't care. Dustin backed into the bar of the office and slammed the door shut. He turned the lock on the door, and flinched as the door shook on its hinges. He yelled over the thudding, "The cops are on the way!"

It made no difference. The old man kept pounding on the door. Then suddenly it came to him... Bill, that was his name.

Chapter 10: Code Red and Endcaps

Rudy hiked across the street. In the still of the night, he could hear sirens. The buildings around him made it hard to tell exactly where the sirens were coming from, and as a police car swerved around the corner, he nearly had to jump out of the way to avoid being run over. If it had been anyone else, he would have shot them the bird and tried to find some sort of rock to throw.

But it was a cop, so he just swore under his breath, and continued walking down the street. The rain-slick pavement reflected the orange streetlights. The chill of the night was finally present, and he was glad that the mugginess of the day was finally gone.

As he approached the convenience store, a mom and pop store run by a family of Asians who apparently never needed to sleep, he saw a man stumbling down the road in the distance. The man was dressed in a puffy green jacket with an orange lining that could be seen every time he took a shambling step. He appeared to be having some trouble walking. Rudy wondered if he were simply drunk or retarded. Either way, he hoped the man was gone when he got out of the convenience store because he looked like the type of person who would ask for spare change. Rudy had no change to spare, out of principle rather than shortage.

The store's bell rang as he entered the store, but there was no one behind the counter. He didn't mind. He hated the way they stared at him as he walked through the convenience store's cramped aisles. Maybe it was his red hair or the fact that he weighed close to three bills, but every time he had used this particular convenience store, which was quite often, the owner had always stared at him, watching his every movement, his eyes squinted and locked on Rudy the entire time. The feel of the store owner's eyes boring into his back always left him a little unnerved. He probably had some sort of shotgun underneath the counter, just waiting for the right person to fuck with the wrong man.

The store wasn't big enough for the amount of inventory they had on hand, so Rudy had to turn sideways to make it through some of the aisles due to all the warm beer and sodas still packed without rhyme or reason in boxes and crates. The cold soft drinks were located in the back of the store; along the way, he grabbed a couple of candy bars and a bag of chips. After all, what good was Code Red if you had nothing to wash down your gullet?

When he pulled the door of the cooler open, he heard the door chime again. He paid it no attention, as his eyes were affixed to the 20 oz. plastic bottles full of glowing red liquid at the end of the store. He grabbed one and shoved it under his armpit. With his free hand, he grabbed another bottle and let the door of the cooler shut on its own. The intensity of the door's slam over the hum of the coolers suddenly made him realize how quiet the store was.

He didn't know why he did it, but he looked up at the circular security mirror to see the man from outside approaching his position. The man bumped some stacked six-packs of Genesee Cream Ale, knocking the green cans to the ground, but he didn't seem to care. He continued his approach. Rudy looked over his shoulder to see if the owner was visible yet, but he was nowhere to be seen.

Rudy turned to the approaching man and said, "Hey, how's it going?" His adrenal glands had dumped their contents into his circulatory system, and he felt the impending doom of a fight or flight situation coming on, as he was not especially skilled at fighting nor flighting. The man simply looked at him, his head down and his arms outstretched towards him. His fingers clawed at the air.

Rudy backed up against the wall as the man slipped on a can of Genesee that he had knocked over. He tumbled forward, cracking his jaw on one of the aisle's metal endcaps. There was little room to maneuver or run, so Rudy began to slide sideways down a narrow aisle that would take him to the counter and near the front door. He was at the counter when the man in the back of the store finally got back to his feet. His jaw was crooked, and blood dripped down the front of his shirt, but he kept approaching, clumsy and plodding, but with a determination that made him seem more like a robot than a man. Rudy had images of The Terminator dancing through his head.

The man came closer, and Rudy looked at him, fear bubbling up in the back of his throat. He fumbled around in his pocket, and pulled out a twenty dollar bill. He crumpled it up and threw it on the counter. "Keep the change," he yelled as he bolted for the front door, the bell again chiming.

If Rudy had bothered to walk behind the counter, he would have seen the store clerk lying on the ground in his own blood, bite wounds covering his throat and arms. But Rudy didn't see him; he ran out of the store, clutching his Code Red, chocolate bars, and a bag of chips in the chill night air.

"What the fuck is wrong with people?" he wondered aloud.

When he had reached safety, which in this case was a block up the road, he stopped, tried to catch his breath and turned around. There was the man, still spilling blood from his nasty jaw wound, coming out of the door of the convenience store... nothing in his hands. His head looked one way then the next. Upon spying Rudy, the man began a slow plod in his direction.

"Fuck." Rudy clutched his goods to his body and began running, something he hadn't done in a very long time. Five long strides into it, he already knew he wouldn't be able to keep up the pace.

Chapter 11: The Munchies

Teach lumbered down the street, clutching a dirty bar rag to the ragged wound on his shoulder. The rag wasn't completely soaked in blood, but it was getting there. He knew that he probably should have stuck around at The Sleazy Goat, but the warmth that flooded through his body couldn't be contained. He had to be in the cool night air. Luckily, he had walked to the bar, and the brief sprinkling of rain that fell on his head was welcome relief. His head began to steam in the night air.

He wobbled side to side in his brown corduroy pants and Dr. Marten's boots. His old sports jacket had pads on the elbows, and the streetlights swam in front of his eyes. His stomach grumbled, and he started to feel hungry. The void in his stomach felt as if it were expanding, and he began wondering when he had become such a lightweight.

Teach toppled over a bush that seemed to pop up out of nowhere. He dropped the towel that he had been holding over his shoulder and didn't bother picking it up. As he shoved himself up off the ground, he noticed that the blood from his shoulder was no longer pouring out of the wound. His stomach grumbled again, and he clumsily brushed himself off and began walking again. Eggs? Maybe he'd make himself some eggs.

He stubbed his toe on the concrete step that led up to the porch of their two-story house. The lights inside were off. The windows upstairs were open. What was he doing? Food? Food... food.

****

Her eyes snapped open when she heard his footsteps in the hallway. She flinched when his keys dropped to the ground. She hoped he didn't wake Kevin up. She loved her husband, but one night a month, he was a monster. Hopefully, he would simply make himself a snack and crawl into bed without incident. Of course, there was a twenty-percent chance that he was hungry for something else.

Katie squeezed her eyes shut and tried to will herself back to sleep, but the noises from the kitchen didn't sound like normal Jason noises. His footsteps were stumbly and the periodic stomp of him trying to catch his balance kept her from dozing off again. He must have really tied one on.

She sat bolt upright in the bed when she heard the clatter of pots and pans on the ground. Who knew being married to a teacher would be so annoying? Great, he gets three months off and acts like a damn high school kid in the middle of the night. Meanwhile, she would have to get up at 7 in the morning and make breakfast for Kevin then take him to his Boy Scout meeting, all with no sleep because someone needs their hand held in the night because he drank too much.

Katie threw the covers back and slid her feet into her slippers. The air was cold on her bare legs, so she put on her bath robe. She walked silently down the hallway, pausing to listen and see if Kevin was still sleeping or not. She didn't hear anything, so she walked softly down the steps to the bottom floor.

When she rounded the corner to the kitchen, she saw Kevin staring into it. He had a concerned look on his face, and he jumped when she put her hand on his shoulder.

His pale face, with sleep still in the corners of his eyes, looked up at her, "Mom, what's wrong with, Dad?"

"Nothing's wrong. Go to sleep." Katie guided Kevin gently back to the stairwell with her hand, and he took one last concerned look over his shoulder before walking back up the stairs. When his maroon sweatpants disappeared from sight, she turned her attention back to her husband, who was noisily rummaging through the refrigerator, making grunting noises, and generally sounding disgusting.

"Hey!"

Jason offered no response. His back was to her, so she couldn't quite see what he was doing.

"Hey, Jason! What the hell are you doing?" she hissed, her arms folded and her voice dripping with annoyance.

Jason turned around, chunks of raw steak hanging from his mouth. His wound had stopped bleeding, and had taken on a blackish hue.

"What's wrong with you? You're going to get e. coli." The meat fell from Jason's mouth and made a sickening slapping sound on the linoleum. Jason held out his arms and began advancing on Katie.

"Alright, cut the shit. I'm not in the mood. I've got to get up in three hours." Still he did not respond. She backed away from Jason just as he came within reach of her. He lunged at her and for the first time, she noticed the wound on his shoulder. His mouth opened incredibly wide, and the part of her that ran on pure instinct brought her knee up into his groin. The effect was minimal, and just as Jason was about to take a bite out of her face, she fell backwards. He toppled over her and onto the ground next to her.

Immediately, she rolled onto her stomach, and began crawling away. Jason clumsily clawed after her. She aimed a pink-slippered foot at his face, and kicked as hard as she could. The force of the kick knocked him backwards, which gave her time to scramble to her feet. She ran up the stairs, contrary to every instinct in her body, and ripped open Kevin's door. "C'mon. We have to get out of here."

"What's wrong, Mom?"

"Just get up. C'mon let's go." Kevin popped to his feet and followed after her. They stopped at the landing to see Jason at the bottom of the stairs slowly making his way up, tottering back and forth and using the wall for support. He snarled at them when he saw them.

"What's wrong with Dad?" Kevin whimpered.

"I don't know," she said as she shoved Kevin into her bedroom. She closed the door behind her and locked it. "Grab my phone. We need to call the police." As Kevin pulled her phone from the charging dock, the wood of the bedroom door shuddered. It wasn't going to last long.

Kevin made as if to hand her the phone, but she refused it. "Call 911," she huffed as she began dragging her oak dresser in front of the bedroom door. It shuddered again as Kevin dialed the numbers.

Chapter 12: Haldol and Bite Wounds

Clara was worried. The ride from the club to the hospital hadn't been much longer than 30 minutes, but Courtney was already babbling and hallucinating. The E.R. waiting room didn't seem too busy, but as it usually goes with these things, even a handful of patients seemed to be too much for the hospital to handle at once. Clara had filled out the paperwork as best as she could, but there's only so much a person can do for another person. Who the hell knows their boyfriend's social security number? Psychopaths, and she wasn't one of those. Courtney wasn't in much of a mood to be helping her answer the questions. Her first attempt at asking him his social security number had led to an incoherent string of numbers that ended after the sixth one. When she asked him if he could repeat that, he merely shook his head no.

She pressed her hand against his forehead, and flinched at the warmth radiating from his brow. How long could it take to get into the E.R.?

Just when she was about to go up to the nurse's station and begin making a scene, they called Courtney's name.

Clara helped Courtney stand, which was a chore. He had lost all semblance of coordination, and after they had taken two steps, Courtney toppled forward on his face. He immediately tried to rise, but it was no use. He seemed like a newborn horse trying to get to its feet for the first time.

The nurse that had called Courtney's name brought a wheelchair over. Together, the nurse and Clara helped the helpless Courtney into the chair, while Clara apologized and said, "He didn't even drink that much." Clara followed with a growing sense of dread as they wheeled him back into the E.R. proper.

They sat in a room with a sheet around it and machinery seemingly stationed haphazardly. The nurse began asking questions with all of the interest of a robot, "So you say your husband was bit?"

"Uhh, yes, but he's not my husb..."

"And how did he get bit?" the nurse asked as she futzed with a wireless keyboard and stared at a computer screen.

"We were at a punk concert, and this guy, he umm, well, he bit him on the face."

The nurse started typing information into the keyboard, so Clara continued speaking, "He was fine when we left."

"Has he been drinking?" the nurse asked rudely.

Clara, somewhat taken aback, answered truthfully, and the nurse just nodded her head, as if that explained everything.

"Listen. When we left the club he was fine, just bleeding from his face. He wasn't like this when we left."

The nurse listened punctiliously, but it was clear that she had already decided that Courtney was just another person who had overdone it. From her days of pink hair, pierced eyebrows, and fishnet stockings, she knew the look of instant judgment when she saw it. She also knew it was pointless to explain ignorance from a perceived position of inferiority. She just hoped that whoever the doctor was didn't have the same problem, or else she would have to fix the problem the way she did in the old days... with a fresh set of bony girl knuckles upside the bridge of a nose.

"I'll just take his blood pressure, and then the doctor will be in to see you." The nurse leaned in close to put the blood pressure cuff on Courtney's arm, and that's when he came awake. For the first time, his eyes seemed to focus, and as the nurse went to tighten the blood pressure cuff, he grabbed her hand, pulled it to his mouth, and took a meaty chunk from between her thumb and index finger.

The nurse's screams were immediate. She pushed Courtney away, and he and the wheelchair he was sitting in rolled into the curtain that separated the rooms. His arms began to flail, and he became entangled in the curtain.

Clara rose to her feet, concerned for the nurse, for Courtney, and slightly for herself. "Are you ok?" she asked the nurse.

The nurse held her hand away from her body as blood splashed on the white linoleum floor. "Does it look like I'm ok?" she spat at Clara. "Fuck."

Just then a male nurse came around the corner. "What the hell is going on in here?"

Courtney had finally gotten to his feet and freed himself from the hanging curtain. Clara went towards him to try and calm him down, but she took a step back when she saw the complete lack of recognition in his eyes. She didn't know who that was, but it wasn't Courtney. It wasn't the same guy who used to steal car stereos from unlocked cars at 2:30 in the morning. It wasn't the same guy who had held her for days when her mom had died. The man in front of her was a savage creature.

The male nurse blocked Courtney just as he was about to attack Clara. The veins in the nurse's forearms stood out as he wrestled with Curtney. Eventually, the nurse flipped Courtney around and tripped him to the ground. "Molly, get some Haldol in this guy."

Courtney continued to wrestle with the nurse, his teeth gnashing and clicking together in bites that would be sure to take off a finger if the nurse wasn't too careful. Molly opened up drawers feverishly until she found what she was looking for. She pulled a syringe out of another drawer, stuck it in a vial of clear liquid and filled it.

"What are you doing?" Clara asked.

After squirting out the air bubbles, she plunged the syringe into Courtney's arm. "Don't worry, doll. We're just sedating him."

There was nothing she could do. She just hoped it would take effect quickly so that Courtney didn't wind up hurting himself. They waited, but Courtney wasn't becoming any less violent.

"Jesus, is this guy on drugs or something? He should be snoozing by now," the male nurse said while straining to hold Courtney down.

"You think I should give him some more?" asked Molly.

"Is that safe?" Courtney asked.

Without acknowledging her, the male nurse simply said, "Go get Joan. She can make the call."

Molly walked out of the room, yelling for someone named Joan.

Clara sat patiently, chewing on her finger nails. "Are you hurting him?"

The male nurse looked up at her and smiled, "Lady, if anyone is going to do the hurting around here, it's going to be this guy." The nurse stopped smiling when she saw the worry on her face. "I'm sorry," he grunted, "is this your guy?"

Clara nodded her head in the affirmative. She didn't want it to happen, but a tear came to her eye.

"We'll help him out lady." He smiled again. "My name is Miles. I'd shake your hand, but that might not be a good idea considering the circumstances."

A group of people entered into the room, led by a tired but attractive lady with a brown ponytail and an air of exhaustion about her. She was followed by the frazzled Molly, still clutching her bleeding hand to her chest, and a few burly looking security guards.

The doctor took one look at the situation, and sighed, "Alright, you guys, let's get him strapped down."

The security guards moved to Courtney and grabbed him by the arms. As Miles rolled off of him, the guards pulled Courtney to his feet. He dangled in the air, the toes of his boots scraping against the tile of the floor as they dragged him to a gurney in the hallway. They dumped him on the gurney, and that's when Courtney made his move. He sat up quickly and bit the first man on the forearm. For as big as he was, the security guard's scream was surprisingly high-pitched. The burly guard's first reaction was to shove Courtney away, which sent him and his gurney wheeling away down the hall.

It would have been comical if the gurney hadn't knocked over another doctor who hadn't been paying attention. Courtney rolled off the gurney, blood smeared all over his face, and pounced on the back of the doctor who was trying to get to his feet after being knocked over.

Before they could get to him, Courtney had sunk his teeth into the nape of the doctor's neck. The two security guards had trouble prying Courtney's teeth apart. One of them actually began hitting Courtney, and that's when Clara sprung into action.

She charged the security guard who had punched Courtney and kicked him between the legs. He fell to the ground like a sack of doorknobs. The other security guard with the bite on his forearm blocked her second kick, which was aimed for the exact same place. He put his arms on her shoulders and pushed her away. She slid across the floor, and came to rest at the foot of an oxygen tank. That's when the screaming began.

It wasn't from anyone that could be seen. It was from another curtained off room. The doctor, Joan, said it all for everyone involved... "What now?"

Chapter 13: Use Your Head

Mort strained his ears when he heard the police radio squawk to life.

"Car 32, what's your status? Over," said a male voice over the radio.

Weasel picked up the microphone and replied, "Dispatch, we're on the way in with two suspects in custody. Over."

"We're going to need you to shoot on over to 2378 Lincoln. We've got a mother and a minor trapped in a room. Sounds like the father is possibly intoxicated. We need you to head on over there and check it out. Over."

"Isn't there anyone else? We've got two suspects in the car already. Over."

There was a pause on the other end, and then the dispatcher spoke again, "Sorry, 32. The switchboard's flooded tonight, and all others are occupied. Must be the full moon. You guys are the closest and most available. Over."

"Alright, dispatch. En route. Over." Weasel slammed the receiver home. "Fuck. I can't believe this shit. Hit the lights, Arnie." Weasel looked over at his partner, who was either sleeping or unconscious. "Fucking, Arnie. Wake up, man."

"Hey. Is he alright?" Mort asked from the backseat, which caused a fresh round of stirring and struggling from Dirty Kurt.

Weasel looked at Mort using the rearview mirror and said, "Don't you worry about him. He's just catching some winks. He's got a newborn baby at home. Bastard's probably dead tired."

"Some dad he's going to be, beating up on homeless people. That kid doesn't have a chance." Mort knew he shouldn't have said it, but he was still pretty pissed off about the whole situation.

Just then Weasel pulled up to a red light and he turned around in his seat and regarded Mort with his squinty brown eyes. "I'm only gonna tell you once. You shut your face for the rest of the night, or you won't be making it to the police station. You got that?"

Mort glared at the policeman, and that anti-authority, free as fuck part of him wanted to tell the cop to kiss his ass. The part of him that enjoyed not bleeding decided to just nod his head, but slowly so the cop knew he wasn't totally on board.

It was good enough for Weasel, so he turned around and began driving. The houses of the night flew by, silent in the city's darkness. They would occasionally pass a denizen of the night, stumbling along to God knows where. Mort thought there were more than usual, shambling around in last night's clothes or sometimes pajamas, eyes glazed over, placing one foot in front of the other. It was beautiful to Mort, the silence of the city at 2:30 in the morning. He understood why some people would want to go out for a walk at night, away from all the stares, the judgment, and the harassment.

Mort was lost in thought as they cruised past an alley. He thought he saw a figure covered in blood crouched over another prone figure, but the alley flashed by so quick that he couldn't be sure. Perhaps he just needed to nap. Mort looked over at Dirty Kurt, who hadn't stopped biting at the bag over his head for the entire ride, the clicking of his teeth sent shivers up his spine. He could wait to sleep.

They pulled over in front of a two-story house, yellow and generic. Weasel, whose forehead was beaded with sweat, undid his seatbelt, and said, "C'mon, partner. Time to work." Weasel opened the car door partway and made to get out of the car, until he noticed that his partner wasn't waking up. He closed the door with a meaty thunk, and then Weasel leaned over and shook Arnie by the shoulder. "Wake up, man. We got stuff to do."

Worry washed over Weasel's face, and he leaned in close to Arnie, "Are you ok? Stop fucking around, man." Weasel put his fingers on Arnie's throat, searching for a pulse.

"Is he alive?" Mort asked, genuinely concerned.

Weasel took his fingers away from Arnie's throat, and replied, "Barely, but he's burning up. I better call for some help."

Weasel turned away from Arnie and reached for the police radio. Mort jumped as Arnie's eyes snapped open and he grasped Weasel's hand. Weasel's eyes opened wide, and he was clearly in shock as Arnie pulled his hand toward his yawning mouth lined with big, square teeth. Without hesitation, Arnie chomped down on Weasel's fingers.

Weasel screamed, "What the fuck are you doing..." and then the words turned to screaming as blood poured out of Arnie's mouth. He twisted his head from side to side, and when Weasel finally yanked his hand free, the fingers were gone. Weasel held his hand up in front of his face, as blood squirted out of the stumps of his index and middle finger. He only stared at them for a second before Arnie began crawling toward him for seconds.

"Shoot him! He's gone crazy!" Mort screamed.

Weasel seemed to have heard him, and he tried to pull his pistol free. He hissed through his teeth as he bashed his finger stumps against the butt of his pistol. Arnie crawled closer, but the seatbelt he had been wearing was impeding him. Weasel kicked at the man, and Arnie's nose crumpled underneath the force of his police boot. With his other hand, Weasel tried to reach across his body and pull the pistol free. He was undoing the strap on the holster, when Arnie sunk his teeth into Weasel's inner thigh.

With his fingers, he clawed at the flesh of Weasel. His screams echoed throughout the squad car, and Mort put his hands over his ears and squeezed his eyes shut, as if it were all a dream that would go away. His eyeballs ached from the pressure. The screaming continued, and when he could stand it no more, Mort opened his eyes to see Weasel shuddering in the driver's seat, his hand smearing blood on the mesh that separated the front seat from the back seat, while Arnie continued to chew on his flesh. At some point while his eyes were closed, Arnie had gotten free from the seatbelt, and crawled all the way over. Just now, he was clawing at the eye of Weasel, but the tough, rubbery morsel wouldn't come free.

At this point, Mort realized just how bad his situation was. He was trapped in a car with two madmen and a corpse that was soon to rot. He looked down at Dirty Kurt, who was still gnashing his teeth back and forth in the hopes of finding some flesh of his own to chew. If he had been alone in the backseat, he could have laid down on his back and used his legs to kick out a window, but with Dirty Kurt taking up half of the backseat and intent on biting whatever came near him, he only had two options... his head or his elbow, and who ever heard of someone breaking out of a police car by using their head?

He was wondering how bad it was going to hurt, when Weasel's eyes opened.

"Aw, what the fuck?" Mort groaned.

Weasel sat up, and Arnie lost interest in his latest meal. They both turned their attention to Mort and smashed their faces against the metal mesh that separated the front seat from the back. Their fingers wriggled frantically poking through the mesh as if they could reach him with just their fingers, and when they started drooling, Mort couldn't stand it anymore.

He began hysterically bashing at the window of the police car with his elbow. The first hit was especially painful, and the glass didn't even crack. He hit it again and again, but the pain in his elbow was intense, and with each bash it hurt more and more. Maybe he would have to use his head.

Chapter 14: Speakerphones and 12-Gauge Shotgun Shells

Zeke wasn't unconscious for long, but it had almost been long enough. A police siren pierced the veil of unconsciousness that he was shrouded in. His head throbbed and each peak of the siren had made it seem as if his head was going to explode... so when the sound was completely gone, and no one was there to help him, he finally opened his eyes, only to see the dead man from the car stumbling toward him, his pants around his ankles and blood and shreds of flesh in place of what should usually be there.

The ex-soldier propped himself up on his shoulders and cleared his parched throat, "Holy shit. I thought you were dead," he slurred, still trying to clear his throat. There was no response from the man, just more awkward stumbling as he shuffled across Zeke's front yard.

Zeke didn't like the way the man looked, so he pulled himself to his feet, still trying to make sense of the new world around him. At any moment, he was sure that his brain would shoot out the front of his forehead. The pain and the pressure were intense, and he had to squint to focus his eyes. The man came closer, shreds of groin flesh jiggling with each awkward step.

Zeke had seen enough. He turned around and walked inside his house. He closed the door, and turned the two extra deadbolts he had installed just the other week. Inside, Zeke grabbed a cigarette from the pack on the coffee table, and then he grabbed the phone. After lighting the cigarette, he held the phone in one hand and dialed the police.

A robotic voice informed him that all lines were busy and that he should stay on the line.

"What the fuck do you mean 'all lines are fucking busy'?" He placed the cigarette in his mouth and with his free hand he reached into his pocket and pulled out a Zippo lighter. He snapped it open by applying pressure to the edge of the Zippo's cap. Why did it work? He didn't know... but it was a handy little trick when you had one hand busy holding a gun on someone. It also worked when you were holding a phone in one hand. He lit the cigarette and let the smoke clear his mind.

The stumbling, bleeding bastard on  his lawn finally reached the front of his house, whereupon he immediately began banging on the door. The metal grate of the screen door rattled loudly, and he could only imagine it would be a matter of time before one of his neighbors stopped by to investigate.

He pressed the speakerphone button on the phone's cradle and calmly walked into the kitchen to grab a beer. He had a feeling tonight was going to be a long night. With one calloused thumb, he popped the top of his Budweiser, and took a nice long sip as the message from the police continued to loop.

Zeke put out the stub of his cigarette in an ashtray, and walked over to his gun cabinet. He considered his options for a few seconds before pulling the shotgun out. He loaded it with shells and then walked to the front window to look at the man that was banging on his door.

He was a middle-aged man, white, balding on top, and sporting an outfit that gave him the feel of a used car salesman. The eyeglasses on his face were crooked and looked ready to fall off. His arms and knuckles looked like they were quickly becoming damaged from all of the banging, but the most disconcerting aspect of the man, besides his shredded gear, was the fact that there simply was no emotion in his face. Though his wounds must have been painful as hell, there was simply nothing there.

"Hey, dumbfuck," he taunted.

The only response was that the man moved to the window he was looking out of and resumed his banging. He was glad that he had put the bars on his windows. "What's the matter, buddy, can't get laid for free like the rest of us?"

There was no response, and at this point, Zeke expected as much. He pulled the shotgun up, racked home a shell and pointed the barrel at the man's face. Again there was nothing. The man didn't even blink He lowered his shotgun, and closed the blinds.

If this were overseas, there would already be a bloody, headless mess sitting on his porch. But this was America, land of the free, and he could tell something was wrong with the guy outside. You didn't just go around executing people, especially if they were ill.

"Hello? Thank you for waiting," announced a voice on the speakerphone.

Zeke took a swig from his beer and said, "Well, it's about damn time. I thought you guys were out to lunch."

"What is the nature of your emergency?" asked the voice on the phone.

Zeke just laughed, and said, "Honey, you ought to get over here and see for yourself."

"Is anyone hurt? Do you need an ambulance?" she replied, unmoved by his humor.

Zeke fumbled around in his pocket for another cigarette. "I'm not sure an ambulance is going to help any of these people, but yeah, we've got some injuries here. 212 SE Thompkins. See you soon."

"Sir, stay on the..." Zeke hung up the phone with the press of a button. He lit his cigarette and took a long drag from it. If those damn cops didn't get here within the next fifteen minutes, he was going to dump all nine pellets from the 12-gauge shotgun shell of his SPAS right into that man's face. And if that didn't work, he would do it again until it did

.Chapter 15: Old Han

Bill had been banging on the door for a good twenty minutes when he heard a commotion in the bar. At first, Dustin didn't know what to make of all the noise. Then he heard someone shout, "Freeze or I'll blow your brains out!" When he heard that iconic cop cliché, he knew that the cavalry had finally arrived.

"I'm in here! Help! This guy is crazy!" he had shouted.

Apparently Bill wasn't very good at following instructions, because a few seconds later, he heard one cop tell the other one to taze Bill. He heard a pop as the tazer was fired, but he couldn't tell what the result was.

"What the hell is wrong with this guy?" asked one cop.

"I don't know. Let's hit him again," his partner replied, his voice muffled by the door between them and Dustin.

"Jesus, he just keeps coming," he heard one of the cops say, disbelief in his voice. "That's a tough old fucker, right there."

Apparently, Bill was something of a Superman. He heard a struggle ensue, and after some wrestling around, one of the cops yelled at him, "It's alright. You can come out now."

Dustin looked around the room and picked up a broom, just in case. Slowly he turned the doorknob and poked his head out into the bar. He saw one cop with a knee pressed down on Bill's back, while the other officer was looking at a bite mark on his arm.

"Oh, fuck," Dustin said. Dustin turned right back around and locked himself inside the bar office.

There was some pounding on the door. "Sir? Would you like to explain what's going on here?"

"Listen, I know this is going to sound crazy, but this evening, it was last call, and this guy comes in and takes a bite out of another guy. I help him out. We're rolling around, tusslin' you might say, and then he takes a bite out of the old guy's neck."

"What old guy?" asked the cop.

"The one you have lying on the ground. We thought he was dead, I mean, he had his jugular ripped out by that other guy. The one without a face."

The cop tried the doorknob, and then said, "Why don't you come out here, so we can talk. This yelling through the door nonsense is getting old, and I'd like you to explain the fact that this guy has had his throat ripped out and is still kicking?"

Dustin leaned back against the wall, "That's the thing officer. The old man was fine until he got bit. Then he died. Now he wants to bite everyone he sees. Now one of you is bit, and it's only a matter of time until he's walking around biting other people. It's like something out of a movie!"

"Sir, you can either come out of there or we're coming in to get you. We can sort this all out at the station."

Dustin popped up out of the chair he was sitting in, and screamed through the door, "Maybe you're not listening to me! There is some crazy shit going on out there, and I'm not coming out until it's done!

Dustin could hear muffled talking, and then the cop he had been talking to said, "Alright, you leave us no choice. We're going to break the door down."

The door shook in the jamb, and then another voice was heard, the slightly crazy voice of the owner of the bar. "What you do here? No break door. You like if I come to your house and break door?"

Old Han had been running The Sleazy Goat for years. It was no surprise that he had suddenly showed up out of nowhere. The crazy old bastard probably had at least ten live feeds of the bar fed into his house. You never knew what the old bastard would be accusing you of.

"Uh, sorry, sir. We're just trying to get the guy out of the back room there."

"Well why don't you ask? I have key right here. Why don't you ask? No, you start breaking door." Old Han sounded as crazy as ever. "And who is going to clean this mess? My carpet is ruined!"

Dustin heard the metallic rattle of a key sliding home in the office door, and then it opened. There stood Old Han, his eyeglasses perched on the end of his nose and his greasy, black hair combed sideways over his balding head. With his massive key ring on his belt, he looked more like a janitor than the owner of one of the diviest dives in town. When he laid his eyes on Dustin, they widened, and the corners of his mouth dipped down in a frown. Old Han didn't so much view his employees as people as he did livestock.

"What you doing in here? How did you get everyone killed? Get out of my office! You're fired!"

Dustin didn't understand exactly what the old man was saying, the accent on Old Han was pretty bad. How a guy could live in a place for decades and not learn to speak the language was befuddling to Dustin. "What the fuck do you mean fired?"

"What the fuck to you. You fired! What the fuck to you!"

Dustin couldn't believe what he was hearing. "You're firing me as if this is my fault? Some guy comes in here and bites this dude's throat open and it's my fault? You're unbelievable."

"You leave door open. You let man behind bar, rip out phone. Now I pay for it!" Han screamed as his face grew more and more red. "Now you clean mess, and get out."

Dustin's mouth dropped open at the last part. "You think I'm going to clean this shit? Fuck you. I quit." The cops stood idly by as Han and Dustin had their shouting match, but when Dustin made to walk off, they spoke up.

"You can't just leave the scene of a crime," said the taller of the two cops, the black one without the bite mark on his arm.

"Yeah, we're going to need a statement from you," coughed the other cop, a short, red-headed gentleman with thick plastic eyeglasses, and sweat beading up on his forehead.

"C'mon, man. I just quit. Can't we at least do this outside? I can't stand the stench of this cheap motherfucker anymore."

"Motherfuck to you!" yelled Han.

The cops looked at each other, and the black one said, "Alright, let's talk outside."

The tall black cop pulled Bill to his feet and hustled him out of the front door of the bar. The ginger cop followed, and so did Dustin. As Dustin put his hand on the door, Old Han yelled to him and asked, "Who is going to clean up this mess?"

Dustin shot him the finger and walked out the door.

Chapter 16: A Total Lack of Trumpets

Katie nearly relaxed when she saw the flashing blue and red lights pull up outside, but just as she was about to throw open the upstairs window and call out to the cops, Jason found a hidden reservoir of strength and threw the bedroom door open, the legs of the oak dresser screeching against the hardwood floor. Kevin, not being strong enough, simply slid along the floor in his socks, even as he put all of his pitiful weight into holding the dresser against the door.

Jason's eyes fixed on Kevin, and Katie knew she had to do something. "Hey! Over here! You want to fight with someone, fight with me." Jason's attention was momentarily drawn, and she could see that he was conflicted about who he should attack, the one making all of the noise or the one that was closest. Jason finally made up his mind, or what was left of it anyway, and slowly approached Katie.

She quickly threw open the window, as the door was blocked off by Jason's lumbering form.  She continued calling the creature that was no longer her husband, hoping to distract him from the sight of Kevin inching towards the door. She backed out onto the roof, wishing for something with more grip than a pair of pink slippers.

 Everything was going according to plan, until Kevin, intent on not taking his eyes off of his father for even a second, bumped into the dresser and sent the lamp crashing to the floor. It's ceramic base burst into several pieces with a crash, drawing Jason's attention. Katie blinked and when she opened her eyes Jason's arms were around Kevin who struggled to get away.]

"Stop! You're hurting me! Daddy!" he shrieked, sending chills through her body. Kevin's pleas fell upon deaf ears... and then Jason had his teeth in Kevin's throat.

Katie's slippered feet slid on the hardwood floors, and she felt like she was in one of those nightmares where you run and run, but you just can't seem to break free. By the time she reached her son, he was covered in blood, and the light was fading from his eyes. She tugged him out of Jason's arms, tears streaming down her face. "How could you?" she yelled, dragging Kevin's rapidly fading body down the hall and away from Jason.

Jason's only response was to shamble down the hallway, his hunger not sated. Kevin's feet thumped against the steps as she shuffled backwards down the stairwell, Kevin coughing up blood the entire time. She fumbled at the front door, but thankfully it was unlocked. Jason's shadowy shape teetered at the top of the stairs, and then he suddenly lost his balance and rolled to the bottom. His arm was clearly broken, but she didn't really care at the moment as she backed out into the yard, tugging her dead son like a load of laundry in a gunny sack. She knew he was dead, but she wasn't going to leave him behind. She would never leave him behind.

Kevin rose from the pile he had collapsed in, a bone poking through the skin of his forearm. The lack of pain on his face made her skin crawl, and she began yelling for help.

The cop car was there, but the cops seemed completely uninterested in helping her. Instead they seemed to be trying to get at the man in the back seat who was bashing his head against the window. Blood ran down his black face into his bushy beard, and when he saw her, a fire of hope lit his eyes.

"Lady! Help me! Get me out of here!" he yelled.

She continued dragging Kevin down the street, away from her murderous husband. She didn't know what was going on, but she wouldn't stop until Kevin was safe. His socks were soaked by the time she heard the window of the cop car break. As she looked up, she saw the man, who had the tell-tale look of homelessness about him, crawl out of the window. Despite her curiosity, the fact that Jason was still chasing after them kept her moving down the street.

She had dragged poor Kevin a block when one of her neighbors came running out of his house. He was an old man in flannel pajama bottoms and a plain, white t-shirt. At least 70-years-old, she had seen the man dutifully go for walks everyday for the last ten years. Though they had never shared anything but a wave, she could sense that he wanted to help her, which was good because she didn't know how much longer she could drag Kevin.

The old man helped her lift up her son, and with one of Kevin's arms over each of their shoulders, they carried him inside and laid him down on the couch. The old man ran over to the door, closed it, and locked it. It wasn't long before Jason was at the door, pounding on it.

Katie was unaware of any of it. She knelt next to the body of her son, holding his hand and rocking back and forth while calling his name.

She didn't even notice as the old man called the police and received a busy signal every time. She had no idea how long he had been trying, as her grief seemed to impair all sense of time. In the night, there was an explosion, and for a second, Katie thought the world was ending, and she wouldn't have to bear being without her son any longer. There were no trumpets, no plagues. Hell, pigs didn't even fly. But she knew she would never have to be without her son again, because he had sat up on the couch and was blinking his eyes.

Chapter 17: From Worse to Worser

"Get that man secured!" Joan shouted as she ran down the hallway to where she had left the sick old lady and her worried husband. Clara didn't know why, but she followed along. There wasn't much she could do for Courtney now, as the two security guards had him on the ground and were securing his hands and feet with zip ties

A group of doctors and patients had gathered around the curtained off room where the screams had came from. Some had their hands over their faces. Other simply stared in awe. Joan had enough of the gawking. Why weren't any of these people acting? With a strong hand, she yanked back the curtain, and there she was, the sweet, sick old lady chewing on her husband's corpse... scratch that, he wasn't a corpse just yet.

His head lifted slightly and he locked eyes with Joan, as if to say, "Why did you leave me?" The thing that would stick with her wouldn't be the sights, though they were horrific; the thing that really stuck in her memory was the noise of the dying husband's intestines as the old lady's hands pulled them out of his abdomen through a ragged tear that seemed no bigger than a quarter. The wet, slopping sounds, amid the silence of the onlookers, were only broken by the oddly tranquil, pained sighs of the husband, as he stared at Joan, curious and accepting.

When the woman took a bite out of the intestines, as if they were some sort of jerky stick, Clara, and a few others, couldn't help but lose their lunch. The smell of fecal matter assaulted the group as the man's intestines were torn open amid the sound of retching and bile splattering across the floor. Joan felt sorry for the janitors tonight.

The retching did have another effect. The old lady finally stopped eating her husband, and focused her eyes on the group. When she shoved her husband's now dead corpse off of the bed and stood up, the crowd backed up as if they were in a movie theater watching a horror movie and it had just turned real. They couldn't tear their eyes away, but only because they didn't believe it was actually happening.

The old lady's hospital gown was smothered in red, and as she stumbled toward the group, Joan became instantly aware that whatever happened next would likely be laid at her feet.

"Officers!" she yelled. "We've got another situation over here. The same as that guy I think."

The two security guards ran down the hall, the one with the bite on his arm moved noticeably slower and he was looking a little green around the gills. She supposed she probably looked the same after witnessing the old lady's lunch. She felt bad that she didn't even remember her name. "I hope you brought more zip ties."

The old lady lunged at them, and the security guards easily tackled her to the ground while avoiding her biting. The crowd dispersed, some hastening for the exit to the E.R., others mollified and returning back to their own personal world as if everything were under control; horrible, but under control.

"What is wrong with her?" Clara asked.

Joan looked at her, folded her arms, and said, "I don't know."

Just then, a group of paramedics burst through the swinging doors of the E.R. A patient fought for her life on the gurney they were wheeling. "Make way!"

Clara and Joan saw the tell-tale mark of teeth around the ragged wounds on the woman's face.

"This is not good," Joan said to no one in particular.

Chapter 18: Pop-Tarts and Paint Thinner, the Breakfast of Champions

Mort's elbow seriously hurt, but not as much as his forehead. When his head finally stopped swimming, he crawled out of the window, eternally thankful that the cops hadn't seen fit to cuff his hands behind him. Just as with most things in his life, his landing wasn't graceful. Amid broken shards of safety glass and wet pavement, he slapped into the ground.

When he got to his feet, he saw an old man help the lady that had run from the house. One of those things appeared to be chasing her. He couldn't blame her for not helping him; he had seldom asked for help and the results had always been the same.

Mort pulled a cigarette from his pocket, lit it, and looked at the squad car. The creatures inside were still focused on him, and he had had enough of it. He ambled into the recently abandoned house, limping on his bad knee. It looked fine except for the fact that the front door had been left ajar.

It was a nice home, simple in its decoration. Nothing stood out, just plain furniture that you could find at any large department store and a couple of pictures. The blood stains on the stairs were the only real original touch. There wasn't much to see, so he headed back to the kitchen to find what he needed.

Mort stepped over the raw steak on the ground and opened up the cupboard under the sink. Just as he expected, he found a delightful array of cleaners, but it was the metal can of paint thinner that drew his attention. He pulled it out and stuck it under his arm. As he stood up, he noticed a box of Pop Tarts sitting on the edge of the counter.

"I don't mind if I do," he said to no one in particular as he fished out a shiny foil package and opened it. Strawberry... not the best, but hell, it was at least something in his stomach. With the Pop Tarts in one hand, his cigarette in the other, and a can of paint thinner under his arm, Mort walked from the house. He stopped to close the door behind him and left it unlocked, in case the lady that ran from the house ever decided to come back. She might not considering he had probably just seen her dragging her dead son down the street while her dead husband chased her.

The occupants of the squad car were still trying to get at him, and Dirty Kurt had inched closer to the window, although how he planned to hoist himself out of it was anybody's guess. Mort took a drag from his cigarette, and shoved the Pop-Tarts into one of the large pockets on his green military jacket. He popped the top of the paint thinner and sprayed it on the interior of the cop car, as if he were just some regular Joe getting ready to have a barbecue, only this time the charcoal happened to be wriggling humans with a craving for flesh. When he had used up half of the can, he tossed it inside the car, followed by his cigarette.

Flames built slowly in the car. It wasn't the dramatic whoosh he was expecting, but it would get the job done. He had expected screams from Dirty Kurt, as he was the first one to light on fire, but he simply wriggled in the back seat, seemingly unaware that he was being consumed by flames. The smell was awful and when the mesh bag that was over Kurt's face melted to his skin, Mort decided that he had seen enough. He backed away, turned around and limped down the street, away from the fire. He was a mile down the road, munching on the last scrap of strawberry Pop-Tarts when he heard the car explode.

Chapter 19: Iceman and Busy Signals

Rudy had made it back to his apartment. It was a straight shot up the street, and when he turned around, he could see the man with the bloody jaw continuing his march. Rudy was glad that the door to his building locked. He gave the guy the finger, sneered at him, and ducked inside.

He began the laborious climb up the three flights of stairs, his knees creaking at every step... as the steps did at his weight. He pulled an inhaler from his pocket at the second landing, and took a deep pull that tasted like shampoo. As he waited to catch his breath, he heard a rattling downstairs as if someone were trying to get into the building. The pounding was insistent, and Rudy didn't want to stick around to find out what was going on. Besides, it wasn't his job. That's why the building had a security guard. Where the hell was the security guard?

He huffed up the last flight of stairs, fished out his keys, and unlocked the door to his apartment. Rudy placed his things down on the table next to the door, and then slammed the door shut, firing the deadbolt home with a quick twist of his pudgy wrist. He could faintly hear the banging downstairs, but decided to put it out of his mind. If the guy got into the building, someone would call the cops. That's the way the world works. The security guard was probably off getting high somewhere. When he finished, he would see the guy at the door, call, the cops, and the world would be set right again.

Rudy waddled into the kitchen and put his spare bottle of Code Red into the fridge. He then plopped down into his favorite chair in the living room, which sat right in front of his TV. It was actually the only chair in the living room. Rudy didn't often have guests over. As a matter of fact, Rudy never had guests over.

He opened his bottle of Code Red and took a liberal swig. The liquid fizzed as it went down his throat. He switched his TV on and tried to find something on TV. The search didn't take long. He only had about five channels or so. One day, when he was done with college, he would be able to splurge and get cable, but until then, it was local TV... which meant a whole lot of news and disposable sitcoms that made you want to gouge your own eyes out with a butter knife.

His chair creaked as he leaned forward in it, springs popping from the strain. Every channel was a variation of the same thing. Special news reports populated the five channels, except for the WB. That channel only ever played teen dramas and infomercials. As tempting as it was to watch the skinny guy chop food and repeatedly say, "You're gonna love my nuts," he decided to check out the news reports. After all, he was like anyone else... he loved a good bit of disaster.

As he flipped through the channels, he settled on Channel 8 because they seemed to run the most legit news operation in town. They didn't spend as much time running human interest shit or scare tactic pieces about what fruit or vegetable was currently linked to cancer according to a "new study"; just news... news and a weather girl with a rack that wouldn't quit.

A reporter was standing in front of a raging fire. Firemen were in the background, hosing down the flames that were burning out of control. The scrawl underneath read, "A plague of crime strikes cities across the country."

Goddamn, terrorists, he thought to himself. As the reports flooded in, Rudy couldn't tear his eyes away from the screen. It seemed people were dying left and right up and down the east coast.

There was a commotion behind the reporter, who was doing a fairly standard job of reporting the fact that there was a fire in an apartment complex. You could see her complete lack of concern shine behind her dead eyes. A flaming shadow emerged from the building, and paramedics and firefighters rushed to help the victim. How the figure could still be walking was anyone's guess. The cameraman zoomed in on the figure, and for a second Rudy thought he had mistaken a horror movie for the news. The victim's face was burned to a crisp, his eyes were gone, and yet, he was still walking, his jaw opening and closing in a mechanical manner. A couple of firefighters rushed the man, tackled him to the ground and began smothering the flames with a fire blanket.

The reporter droned on, "There appears to be a survivor. He looks to be very badly burned." The reporter and the cameraman rushed in to get a better look. Trust the heartless reporter to take advantage of some poor human's last moments.

The figure in the fire blanket was still struggling, which was no surprise. Anyone that had ever had a burn larger than a Skittle knows just how terrible a deep burn is. The amount of nerves that were firing on that poor guy must be in the thousands, maybe even hundreds of thousands. It wasn't surprising that he would struggle so badly.

"Firefighters here have just rescued a victim from the fire," she said, almost believably. You could see the excitement build in her lips and her cheeks, not the excitement that comes with doing a good job, but the excitement that comes from finally attaining a goal. You could see her dreams of prizes and promotions dancing behind her soulless eyes.

Rudy had seen enough. He picked up his chocolate bar, shoved the last chunk in his mouth and then changed the input over to his X-Box. Just before he switched the input, he thought he saw the burn victim chomp down on the arm of a paramedic that was trying to help him.

That coldhearted bitch would probably actually win a Pulitzer Prize. As his X-Box booted up, he decided that he would pretend that everyone he shot tonight was a vulturistic news reporter. He was just about to enter an online lobby when he heard a door in the hallway slam.

As silently as he could, he walked on his tiptoes to his door. He could hear clumsy footsteps in the hallway. He looked out of his peephole, straining to see anything. He waited patiently; the barely visible pulsing of the neon lights in the hallway played tricks on his eyes. Just when he thought there was nothing there, a shape rushed past the peephole.

It was the neighbor from next door, a relatively nice woman who tended to look at him as if his entire body might be crafted from shit. He couldn't blame her. Few people found redheads attractive. Fewer still were attracted to the 300 pound variety.

Her hair was in disarray. She had clearly just woken up, and he could hear her audience-less muttering as she passed the door.  "Fucking drunk assholes banging on the door..." Her tirade trailed off as she passed his door and headed down the stairs. He hoped she wouldn't be dumb enough to let in his friend downstairs.

The human part of him thought about going out there and warning her about the man downstairs. But then the asshole part of him thought, If she can't figure out not to open the door for an unresponsive man who is bleeding profusely from his face, then she's got bigger problems in her life. This was Darwinism, plain and simple.

Rudy plopped back into his La-Z-Boy, and tried to log into a lobby. The night was slow, and there wasn't nearly as much traffic as there usually was judging from the little map of the world that was featured on the main page. Where normally the entire country of North America was lit up like a goddamn Christmas tree to indicate who was online, this morning there were pockets of darkness here and there. It was odd. Maybe the COD servers were being updated. He hadn't heard about any downtime for the game, but when you sold millions of copies of a game, you could fuck your customers over without even thinking about it. They would always come back.

By now, the franchise had become a tradition more than anything else. Some people only bought one video game a year, and it was always Call of Duty.

Rudy was pondering the dimwittedness of the series' fans when he was abruptly dumped into a domination lobby mid-game. The connection wasn't the strongest and the lag made his character jump around the screen. Rubber-banding they called it. Oh, boy. He wondered what area he had been connected to. Usually, he'd find himself lumped together with local players from the city, in order to cut down on lag. But occasionally, when you played this late in the evening, or morning as it were, you tended to get dumped into random groups of people from all over the country.

"Rudy adjusted the mic on his head and said, "Where are you guys from?"

A staticky voice promptly replied, "Alabama over here."

It appeared the rest of the lobby wasn't using microphones.

"Where are you from?" the other voice asked.

"None of your goddamn business, you fucking noob!" he shot back. He laughed at his own cleverness, while deep down inside, he knew he was not particularly clever. He liked to pretend he was having a good time anyway.

The other man didn't take the bait, and he continued to ignore Rudy as they played. There was a thumping sound over the man's mic. "What the fuck?" he mused intelligently as the thumping continued.

Rudy took the chance to be even more of a dick. "Who is that, your dad trying to break down the door to get a piece of your ass?"

"Fuck you, noobkiller420x," the man spat back. Then, to himself, he said, "Who the fuck is banging on my door like that?"

The man must have left the room, because Rudy stumbled across his character sitting listlessly in a corner. He aimed his shotgun at the man's face and blasted it point blank. "Thanks for the points, Iceman."

Iceman ignored him some more, and instead yelled, "What the fuck do you want? Go away! It's six in the fucking morning!" There was more pounding. Rudy found Iceman again, his character sitting in a different corner of the map but the result was the same.

The pounding continued. "I've had enough of this shit." The sound of a chain rattling could be heard over the mic, and then Iceman said, "I don't know who the fuck you are, but you need to get the fuck out of here before..." Iceman shrieked into the microphone. "Get off me, faggot," he yelled.

Rudy giggled a little bit and said, "Oh my God, I was right. It is your dad." The laughing didn't continue for long, as the screaming went on for quite a while. At one point Iceman pleaded for help and said, "Someone please call the cops. He's trying to kill me."

The whole thing sounded like an elaborate prank, and Rudy wasn't about to take the bait, but then Iceman fell silent. Not long after, he heard groaning, and wet sounds, almost as if someone were chewing steak very loudly with their mouth open. The sound was grossing him out, so Rudy backed out of the lobby when the game was over.

Through the door of his apartment, he heard footsteps pounding down the hallway. By the time he got to the peephole on his front door, his neighbor had already passed and slammed her door shut.

He was about to go back to the comfort of his recliner when he heard an odd groan in the hallway. Slowly, the form of the man that had been chasing him shuffled into sight. Rudy became acutely aware that his breathing was far too loud. Each inhalation sounded as loud as a vacuum cleaner in his ears, while every exhalation seemed even louder. He thought about moving backwards slowly, away from the door, but his bulk had a tendency of rendering any of his attempts at silence completely futile.

The man with the bloody jaw stopped and looked at his door, as if he could almost sense Rudy's presence. Rudy's heart beat within his chest as if it wanted to burst through his ribcage and go for a walk on its own. The man turned and faced his door completely, and Rudy got as good a look at the man as he had ever wanted. The veins in his face were dark, as if he had liquid licorice running through his body. His eyes were oddly speckled, and his lips were cracked and dry. The blood on his jaw dripped down his shiny green jacket, and the man didn't seem to care about any of it. His eyes searched the door for something.

After an eternity locked eye to eye with the man, he finally lost interest and stumbled his way down the hallway. Rudy took a giant step back from the door, and he must have hit the sweet spot on the hardwood flooring of his apartment. The creak wasn't the loudest thing he had ever heard, but at 4 in the morning in a mostly silent apartment building, it wasn't all that easy to miss.

It seemed like it was only one intense heartbeat before the man in the hallway was banging on his door. Rudy fumbled for his cell phone, and he slid it open to expose the keyboard. His thick digits struggled to dial 911, and when he finally got through, there was no answer. A busy signal was all he got. How could the police have a busy signal?

The door rattled in the frame as the man in the hallway continued to bang on the door. His groaning wasn't making the matter any better. Just when he thought the door might give way, Rudy heard a voice in the hallway.

"Oi.  What the fuck do you think you're doin'? It's four in the fuckin' mornin' and I gotta get up in two hours." It was his British neighbor across the hall, a cranky sort, who always seemed to have something negative to say. He could see the hate in his eyes whenever they passed each other in the hallway, but he was glad the bastard lived across the hallway just now.

The lack of an answer from the bloody man in the hallway wasn't the appropriate response for his neighbor apparently. He slammed his door closed behind him as he stepped into the hall and yelled, "Hey, dickhead, I'm talking to you!" There was another silent pause, and then a groan from the bleeding man.

"Back the fuck up, or you'll be bleeding from your nose as well as your chin," his neighbor yelled.

Rudy used the noise as a distraction to scoot closer to the peephole in the door. Unfortunately, the peephole's field of view wasn't wide enough to allow him to see the door to his neighbor's apartment as the doors on either side of the hallway were staggered.

He heard his neighbor strain, and say, "Get the fuck off me!" At that point, Rudy threw the locks on his door and risked a peek into the hallway. His neighbor, clad only in a pair of sweatpants, was pummeling the man in the hallway. They were locked in an embrace, and though his neighbor's punches landed with a meaty thud every time, the other man seemed to not even notice them.

Blood from the man's jaw dripped down his neighbor's chest, and he could see that he had busted his knuckles open on the man. The man with the bleeding jaw seemed oblivious to the fact that the bone structure of his face had been completely rearranged.

His neighbor was tired and sweaty, and his blows landed with less and less ferocity and frequency. Somehow, his neighbor noticed him peeking out his doorway. "Oi, fatstuff, why don't you get out here and help me?"

The split second it took his neighbor to call out to him was enough of a distraction for the man with the bleeding jaw to get a thick bite in on the bicep of the British man. His neighbor popped the man across the chin, and teeth came flying out, along with a chunk of his own flesh from his knuckles.

"I'm calling the cops!" he informed his neighbor before he slammed his own door shut. He turned the deadbolt on his door and ran to the furthest corner of his apartment. He used his pudgy fingers to dial 911, but the number was busy just as it was before. He could still hear his neighbor and the man struggling in the hallway. This night sucked.

Chapter 20: Never Too Late

Dustin stood out front with the cops. He had told them his entire story, but they didn't quite believe every word of it. Luckily, they had received a steady stream of calls, so they were in a hurry to be out and about. They took down his statement and his information, and when the crime scene photographer had left and the coroner had arrived, they let him go about his business. One of them told him not to leave town, but Dustin knew how these things worked. He could leave whenever he wanted to. They'd find him eventually.

He laughed in his head at the sight of Old Han yelling at him in broken English about him cleaning up the mess he had made. He simply hopped on his throwback bicycle with the chrome fenders, gave Han the finger, and rode away.

In the night, Han had yelled, "Fuck to you! You fuck to you!"

Dustin doubted that the man would ever learn proper English, but when you've got all the money, you can afford to treat people like heartless products. He rode down the street, pondering it all, the unfairness of a wannabe despot hiring good people, the wind in his hair, and the silence of the night. Most of all, he pondered the fact that two people had died tonight, and he had witnessed both of them.

The feeling of shock hit him suddenly, as is the case with most haunting experiences, the true impact of them seems delayed, like that moment when you cut your finger and it takes a few seconds for the blood to actually come pouring out. Dustin slowed to a halt, hopped off of his bike without thinking and sat down on the curb.

He put his head in his hands and tried to press the images out of his mind with the palms of his hands. All that seemed to accomplish was making his eyes ache dully. He reached into the pocket of his camouflage cargo shorts and fished out a cigarette. He put it to his lips and lit it. In the smoke that he exhaled, he swore he could see the image of the young man that had stumbled into the bar. Death had walked into the bar tonight, and he was the only one that had left it alive. Well, him and Teach, but who knew where he was.

At that moment, he saw his life with a burning clarity that few people ever see. Pouring drinks for drunks... how did his life wind up that way? What kind of life is that? It's certainly not what he dreamed of when he had been a kid. He could still remember his father's bearded face asking him what he had wanted to be when he grew up. The answer had always been the same... a lawyer.

While the thought of being a lawyer made him feel stupid and naive now, it wasn't the money or the prestige that he wanted; it had always been the ability to help people that had drawn him to the profession. Who did he help now? No one. As a matter of fact, he was guilty of actively making some people's lives worse. You could see the signs on people's faces as they bellied up to the bar with trembling hands and alcohol blooms on their faces... and yet, it was their money and their time. Who was he to deny them the comfort of alcohol? After all, what did anyone really know about anyone else? How can one man make the call for another? Sorry sir, you've had enough.

Now he was the one who had had enough. Dustin vowed to never return to bartending. Instead, he would go back to school and find himself. It wasn't too late. It was never too late... unless the world ended tomorrow, which he highly doubted that it would. Dustin dropped his cigarette to the ground, stepped on it with the toe of his Chuck Taylor's, and dove to the ground when the explosion rocked the night.

Chapter 21: Katie Bar the Door

The old man saw Kevin rise from the couch. Katie paid no attention as the cordless phone dropped from his hands and shattered into pieces on the floor. He was there. He was alive. For the first time all night, something finally made sense.

"Kevin?" she said hopefully. There was no response, and Kevin stumbled around, his arms out in front of him as if he were blind.

"Kevin?" she said again, hoping that he would snap out of his daze and recognize his mother.

She saw his eyes dilate, and then he focused on her, a thin stream of drool running from the side of his mouth. But his face was expressionless, and for the first time in her life, she thought her baby boy didn't actually look like a male image of her. Right now, he looked like his dad, or at least what his dad had suddenly turned into. The raw wound at his throat had stopped pumping blood when they had gotten into the house, but now, as Kevin sat up, the blood ran down the wound, staining his already stained Portland Timbers t-shirt.

She wanted to hug him and make sure that he was alright, but something didn't quite feel right. The old man hurried to the boy and put his arm on his shoulder, looking into his face with concern.

"Jeez Louise, kid. We thought you were dead." The old man's mirth faded as Kevin took a brief look at him with his emotionless face before he launched himself at the old man, snarling and sending drool flying everywhere. The old man fell backwards, and the fact that he walked at least two miles every day did nothing to help the fact that he was old. His hip broke upon impact, leaving him on the ground struggling to fend off the ferocious attack of Kevin.

Katie looked on in disbelief, a glut of emotions surging through her heart and mind. There he was, her boy, alive. He was trying to murder the man who had tried to help them, which was a little disconcerting, so she did what mothers do. She said Kevin's full name, "Kevin Adam Thompson."

Normally, the mere sound of the first two names would be enough to stop Kevin in his tracks. Not so this time. He paid as much attention to her as a blind man pays to paintings. "Kevin Adam Thompson, you get off that man right now!" she yelled in her best mom voice.

The old man pleaded with her to do something. She was at a loss. She stood there, confused, elated, and completely clueless as the old man struggled to keep Kevin from biting into his leathery neck. He was in agony, as each movement sent nerve feedback from his hip up to his brain. His arms burned from the strain and still the woman did nothing. "He's not your son, anymore!" he strained, the veins in his neck popping.

Katie shook her head, as if something the man said had actually made sense.

"Look at him," he pleaded through grit teeth.

Katie, finally understood, and it broke her heart. She would never be the same again. She moved to the old man and pulled Kevin off of him. Immediately, he began attacking her, and she knew that something was not right. The thought of disease sprang to her mind, and the fact that the boy in her arms was cold only made matters worse. She shoved Kevin away, hoping that something would be jarred loose in his mind. He fell across the room, knocking over a bookshelf in the corner. The books tumbled about his head, but he paid them no mind. His only concern seemed to be reaching her and taking a bite out of her flesh. A dark voice in the back of her mind asked her why she kept resisting. She tamped it down in the corner of her mind where she kept her secrets, the dark ones she had never told anyone.

He was upon her again. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the old man crawling backwards. He was trying to move as silently as he could. Eventually he succeeded in dragging himself into the other room. When Katie was sure the old man was out of the room, she tossed, Kevin, gnashing and clawing off to the side. He landed with a thump against the wall, and then she turned and ran out of the room, slamming the bedroom door behind her.

She slumped to the ground with her back against the door. For a second, there was absolute silence, except for the labored breathing of herself and the old man. Then the thumping began. For the second time that night, she held the door against a loved one who now wanted nothing more than to devour her flesh.

His skin glistening with sweat and his shirt covered in Kevin's blood, the old man looked at her and said, "Well, Katie, bar the door."

"How did you know my name?"

The old man laughed out loud, the sort of laugh that you can't help but love. Deep and raspy with age, it echoed throughout the walls of the old man's stuffy bedroom. Katie didn't know whether to laugh with him or cry. It rose up within her, like an infection from out of nowhere. Together they laughed as her dead son beat upon the door outside. Madness was creeping in. It would serve her well.

Chapter 22: Making Stories

The glass shattered, and that was all there was to that. Zeke had already loaded as many shotgun shells as he could into his shotgun. He racked the weapon and steadied it with one hand. He looked at the window to see the used-car salesman pawing through the bars. He was slicing his arm on the glass, but he didn't seem to care.

"I've had about enough of this shit," he said to no one in particular. He pulled the door open in one smooth motion and clomped out onto the porch in his polished, black army boots. He about giving the man a warning, but the dark part of him decided against it. Zeke raised his shotgun as the man turned and squeezed the trigger. Shreds of flesh splattered the light blue porch along with a healthy dose of other red matter. The man flew backwards and fell onto the ground. Zeke reached into his pocket for another cigarette, just as an ambulance pulled onto his street.

With his shotgun tucked under his arm, he was looking down trying to light his cigarette when he saw movement out of the corner of his eye. Zeke couldn't believe what he was seeing; the man on the porch was rising from the ground. It didn't matter that he had just taken a shotgun blast to the chest, he was rising anyway.

The cigarette fell from Zeke's mouth as he mumbled, "No fucking way." Disbelief was replaced by rage. Somewhere in his mind, he saw the flashing lights off an ambulance, he heard the ambulance doors slam shut, and then he heard some sort of shouting. He was too busy racking another shotgun shell to pay any attention to what they were saying. Without hesitation, he leveled the shotgun at the car salesman's head, squeezed the trigger and flinched when his face was speckled by splatters of blood from the man's exploding head.

The headless body slumped to the ground, and Zeke pumped his shotgun one more time. He stood over the body and gave it another blast just to be sure. He calmly walked back to the front door where he had lost his cigarette. He bent down to pick it up, but there was blood all over it. He broke it in half, and then he walked back inside. He plopped his shotgun down on the couch and then pulled a fresh cigarette from the pack in his pocket and lit it. He walked through his Spartan house and into the kitchen, a cloud of smoke following him. With a trembling hand, he turned on the hot water and leaned over the sink, as if he was going to throw up. Steam rose from the sink and billowed around his head.

He had killed people before, in the name of freedom, in the name of democracy. Somehow it was different when you did it out of self-defense. He didn't feel good. He tossed his cigarette in the sink where it hissed.

The water in the sink was piping hot, and he put his hands underneath the tap, enjoying the burn of the water, which somehow felt right. He splashed some water on his face to get the blood off. His head still throbbed from where he had hit his head on the porch, and his hands burned with the heat of the water. He dabbed his face with the old hand towel that hung from the cupboard handles underneath the sink. He stared out the window that looked onto his plain backyard. Square, completely devoid of personality, and 100% unnecessary... just like him.

That's when he realized he was being watched. He turned around to see two cops standing in the doorway of the kitchen, red and blue light ricocheting off the walls behind them. Their guns were trained on him. Zeke turned away from them, turned off the tap water, and giggled a little bit, more to himself than to anyone else.

"Boy, have I got a story for you guys."

Chapter 23: Check-In Time

Clara sat in a hospital room, lost in thought. She was thinking of ways to un-see the things that she had seen. Short of a lobotomy, she wasn't coming up with any ideas.

The door to the room swung open, and a frazzled looking nurse walked into the room. Immediately, Clara popped to her feet and then sank back down into the chair in pain. Her ankle had swollen to twice its size. The nurse saw her pain and began examining her ankle.

"Where's Courtney?" she asked as the nurse, a pretty young blonde, began testing out the flexibility of her ankle.

"Is that the man they had to strap down?" she asked.

She nodded her head and hissed through her teeth as the nurse tested her ankle a little too liberally.

"They've got him up in observation."

"Can I see him," Clara asked.

The nurse looked up at her, obviously wondering how much she should tell her. "I don't think that's such a good idea."

Clara couldn't believe what she was hearing. "Are you going to let me see him or not?"

The nurse looked at her apologetically and said, "That's not really up to me."

"Well then who the fuck is it up to? I'd like to talk to them right now."

The nurse gently let Clara's foot back onto the ground and said, "It looks like you have a high ankle sprain, but we'll probably want to get some X-rays just to be sure."

She didn't know why she did it, but Clara slapped the woman across the face and pulled her closer by her shirt. "I don't give a damn about my ankle. I want to know what's happening with my man. Now either you're going to tell me, or you're going to be a very unhappy person."

The nurse's already big eyes became even wider. Someone at the entrance to the room cleared their throat. "That won't be necessary." It was the doctor who had taken charge in the E.R. Dark bags had appeared under her eyes, and her hair, despite being bound in a ponytail, seemed to have a mind of its own. She stood there looking at her, her hands in her pockets.

There was something of her mother in the woman, and for a second, she was slightly embarrassed of her behavior. She let go of the nurse, and she backed away, thankful that she still had all of her teeth. At least that's what Clara hoped she was feeling.

"How is he?" Clara asked the doctor.

The doctor pursed her thin lips and said, "Not very good."

"What does that mean? Why won't anyone give me a straight answer?"

The doctor walked across the room and sat down on the wheeled examination stool.  She pulled the rubber band from her hair and let her brown locks dangle free before gathering it up with her hands and putting the rubber band back in place. "It's complicated. Your husband seems to have some sort of infection."

Clara shook her head and ignored the husband comment. "What sort of infection?"

The doctor looked out the room's window before answering. "That's the complicated part. We're not sure what type of infection it is. He's burning up, and we're pumping enough antibiotics through him to cure the plague, but he's not responding. There's no cognition there whatsoever."

Clara sat back in her chair and let the doctor's words sink in. As far as she could tell, there was no sign of hope. "Can I see him at least?"

The doctor looked at her and thought for a second. "Normally, I would say it was a bad idea, but maybe you can get him to respond to you."

The doctor stood up and began to walk out of the room. Clara attempted to stand, but her ankle wouldn't allow it. The doctor moved to help her by putting her arm under her shoulder. "We've got to get that checked out."

"After," Clara muttered, "after."

With her arm slung over the doctor's shoulder, they limped through the hospital. As she took in the chaotic state of the hospital, Clara couldn't help but sense that there was an air of discomfort permeating the entire place. Everyone seemed to be in motion, grave looks and pensively chewed lips were everywhere.

The doctor, Joan she had said her name was, didn't say anything, but Clara could feel the tension in her shoulders. Something was not right. When Clara commented on it, Joan merely brushed her off, but she could see the unease in the corner of her mouth, as if she almost wanted to say something but didn't quite know what to say.

They boarded an elevator, and Joan punched the button for the sixth floor. They waited in silence as the door slid shut. When the doors opened again, they began their ponderous approach. Armed security guards lined the hallways, and it appeared they were doing everything by the numbers. A white sign with red letters in the hallway read, "Quarantine Wing."

They weren't kidding when they said that he had some sort of infection. "What do you know about this infection?" she asked as they hobbled towards the checkpoint.

Joan gave her the truth. "We know next to nothing about the infection, but we do know that antibiotics seem to be ineffective. The victims lose cognition, and as you saw before, seem to be driven to consume human flesh. It's a nightmare. I suspect that the disease began as some sort of airborne virus, like the flu, but your husband presents an entirely different sort of scenario."

"How so?" Clara grunted as her ankle sent pain up her leg.

"Well, according to your report, your husband was never sick, and he contracted the infection from some sort of bite. If this disease continues unchecked, and we don't find a cure, we're in for a very bad time."

As they approached the main desk on the floor, an armed security guard stepped in front of them and blocked their passage. Joan showed her I.D. badge, and the man scanned it with a portable scanner. "Dr. Winston," the man said in greeting, then looked pointedly at Clara.

"Don't worry, she's with me." The man stepped to the side and let them pass. It was all very serious business, and the hair on the back of Clara's neck stood up for a second. What Clara had just told her was too much, the possibilities too bleak. Where was her ray of sunshine peaking through the clouds? He was in a room somewhere, not exhibiting cognition as the good doctor had just told her.

They walked past several closed doors. Through the tiny square window in one, she saw the nurse Molly banging on the door from the inside with her bandaged hand. She was no longer wearing her nurse garb. Instead, she had become one of the patients. Sweat stood out on her brow, and when she saw Clara, she let loose a barrage of profanities that kept Clara from being able to make eye contact with her.

"Is she going to be ok?" Clara asked.

Joan looked at her, a wan smile on her face. "We'll find out soon enough." They walked towards another room. This room had a giant observation window, and she could see Courtney strapped to a gurney, his head whipping from side to side, looking for something. His eyes were red-rimmed and his teeth were clenched.

Joan held her card up to a security scanner, and a light on the door handled blinked green. She heard the bolt of the door unlock, and then she turned the door handle. They stepped inside, and Courtney's eyes fixed on them. For a second he was quiet, and then he began thrashing furiously at his bonds. His hands wriggled and clawed at them, which would have been comical if he didn't have the stench of uncontained violence and rage about him.

Clara took one look into Courtney's eyes, and it felt as if a rock had dropped into the pit of her stomach. She didn't know what to do.

Joan looked at her and said, "Talk to him."

Clara lifted her arm off of Joan's shoulder and hobbled over to Courtney. She looked into his once beautiful brown eyes and said, "Courtney? Can you hear me?"

His only response was a low growl. His eyes focused on her, and for a second she saw a glimmer of recognition, but it disappeared quicker than a dream, and then he was trying to get at her, straining the straps that held him down.

"Courtney. It's me Clara. Give me some sort of sign that you can hear me." There was no sign, just more growling and straining.

Joan put a hand on her shoulder, and reality hit home for Clara. She didn't want to do it, but tears escaped from her eyes. Joan put her shoulder under Clara's arm and guided her into another room, away from the sight of the man that would have one day been her husband.

Clara made her way to the bed in the room and lay there sobbing. She didn't know how long she had cried for, but when she was done and ready to leave, she discovered that Joan had gone, and the door was locked. Her sadness became rage, and as she banged on the door, she could hear the nurse Molly down the hallway echoing her sentiment.

Chapter 24: Roasted Goat

Old Han cursed the day that he had hired Dustin. He should have known better once he saw that ridiculous tattoo on the man's forearm. Tattoos meant poor decisions. Poor decisions meant less profits. But what else did one expect from a lazy American who could only find work slinging drinks at a bar? He had no pride. None of them did. Now he stood there in front of his bar, soaking up blood from the green carpet with a mop bucket that looked like it had never actually been clean at any point in its existence. Who could say if it ever had? He had bought it used for 2 dollars when he had first opened the bar.

He looked around the bar and silently cursed it. The keys on his key ring jangled as he furiously attacked the carpet, grunting and muttering under his breath. He would have to call in that other lazy American and try to fill in Dustin's shift. The fury that flooded through his veins drove him to spit on his own floor.

"Stupid fucking American. Motherfuck to him. Motherfuck to all of them." With a swift whisk of the dirty mop, he wiped away all signs of his anger. The green carpet was stained. He could live with that. What he couldn't live with was the thought of having to hire another lowlife scumbag off the street to serve beer to the people that came into his bar.

He had never seen such a disgusting lot of people. Oddly enough, as much as he hated them all, he would rather be cleaning the floor of The Sleazy Goat than sharing the bed with his shrew of a wife. It was her fault that they were stuck in this lazy country in the first place. If he had it all to do over again, he would have talked her into going to France. But no, she had wanted to come to America. They could be in Paris right now, drinking wine and looking at the Eiffel Tower. But, no... they were in Portland, Oregon... America, land of the lazy, home of the idiotic.

Within two years, his wife had assimilated to the point of being unrecognizable. With America had come her freedom. No longer was she the meek little housewife he had married in China. Instead, she was another lazy American, as evidenced by the fact that she had gained fifty pounds since they were first married.

While he built up The Sleazy Goat into a steady income, she loafed around on her ass, eating fast food and watching soap operas. The only thing she had ever contributed to their marriage was a quick spread of the legs, something which he increasingly cared less and less about. The hand was quicker, less messy, and didn't smell like onion rings and expensive perfumes.

He dunked the mop into the bucket a little too vigorously, spilling blood-soaked water all over the floor. Another round of cursing flew from his mouth. It was the only form of English that he was good at, and even then, he was only barely comprehensible. He began mopping again.

He was wringing out the mop when the door opened and a couple of ragged-looking people walked in. Their clothes were dirty, and they had a blank stare on their face. It must have been 3:30 in the morning. Stupid Americans. He would be even richer if the government would just allow them to drink for 24 hours. He had heard that's how it was in Las Vegas. People drinking nonstop, throwing their money and their lives away. At least they had a life to throw away.

The unhappy thought crawled across his mind, tendrils of depression lacing through his brain. He took it out on his would-be customers, as he always did.

"Bar closed. Come back tomorrow."

Instead of turning around, they shuffled drunkenly into the main part of the bar, staring at him blankly.

"You fucking deaf? Bar closed. You already drunk? Fuck off." Now that they had inched closer, Old Han adjusted his glasses and saw that there was something wrong with his new customers. The woman on the left was limping badly, and crusted blood had dried to her leg. She wore a dirty grey bathrobe that looked like it had recently taken a dip in a mud puddle. The man behind her was balding and one of his ears was hanging from the side of his head.

"Get the fuck out. You leave now. I call cops!" They continued to plod towards him. Old Han pulled the mop from the bucket, set it on the floor and broke it in half with one quick kick. Armed with the sharp end of the now broken mop, he advanced on the customers. He swung at the woman, hitting her in the ribs. She didn't make so much as a sound. She merely reached for him clumsily. Old Han stuck out his foot and shoved the woman down with his free hand. She tumbled to the ground without grace, her bathrobe flying open and exposing her nudity.

The man behind her was now upon him. He was big, especially when standing next to the five-foot-six Han. His meaty paws grasped for Han, and he stepped to the side, jumped in the air and dealt him a stinging blow to the side of the head with the mop handle. It did no good. The man's ear fell to the ground.

Old Han's heart raced in his chest. He delivered blow after blow to the tall man. His face rained blood on the already stained floor, but still he came. Han cursed loudly throughout the process, and when the lady finally got to her feet, he found himself trapped between the two. Instinct kicked in and he flipped the broken broom handle in his hand so that he could use it as a spear. He leapt at the tall man, driving the broom handle into the fleshy part of his throat and straight into his brain. The man fell to the ground. Han spun around and gave the woman a short but powerful kick in the kneecap. Her leg buckled and she fell to the side. There was no scream of pain, just mindless progression. Han was about to pull the mop handle free and finish her off when the door to the bar opened and two more lazy Americans tottered in.

They moved quicker than the others, and Old Han found himself trapped. He had needlessly boarded up all of the back exits and windows years ago after he  had nearly lost his liquor license thanks to the youths that loved to sneak into his bar and drink beer. It kept the minors out, but it was also keeping him in.

As he was pondering the situation, he felt the woman wrap her clammy hand around his ankle. He could feel the chill of her claw through the cloth of his pants. He stomped on her wrist, breaking the bone and freeing himself from her grip. Fear took hold of him, and he dove over the bar, looking for some way to put room between himself and his attackers.

"What do you want?" he yelled. One of the men began walking behind the bar. He grabbed a bottle of liquor and tossed it at the man. It clunked off of him harmlessly, so he grabbed another and continued the process. After three errant tosses, he finally hit the man in the head. He stumbled for a second, blinded by the alcohol and glass stuck in his face. The other man, dressed in a bright puffy vest, climbed awkwardly over the bar. Old Han pulled another bottle off the shelf and brought it crashing down over the man's head. Alcohol and glass sprayed everywhere. Without thinking, Han reached into his pocket and pulled out the only American possession he had ever appreciated, a silver-plated Zippo lighter featuring a half-naked redhead with her back turned in a seductive pose. She looked over her shoulder as if she were simply waiting for someone to come and take her on the spot. He opened the lighter, struck the flint wheel, and touched the flame to the man's face. The alcohol immediately caught on fire, and for the first time, it seemed as if the creature actually reacted.

It flailed on the bar, trying to put itself out in vain and spreading the fire throughout the bar at the same time. Old Han looked at the other man, covered in alcohol with glass sticking out of his face. The glint in his eye was not one of insanity, but cold calculated simplicity. Though he loved the lighter, he tossed it at the man, who immediately went up in flames. As the burning man behind the bar flailed around, lighting even more things on fire, Old Han took his chance and vaulted over the bar. The movement went unnoticed by the two men, as their eyes had turned into dried up raisins within moments of the flames hitting their face. Old Han ran from the bar laughing.

He stood out front watching the flames. Adrenaline surged through his body. The flames grew to the point where he could see them through the windows of the bar. When he felt satisfied that the fire could not be put out, only then did he reach into his pocket and pulled out an ancient cell phone. He dialed 911, secretly hoping that they wouldn't answer. Even better... the line was busy. As the fire roared and crackled, he could hear exploding liquor bottles inside. This was the break he had been waiting for. For years, he had thought of torching his own bar, but he was never quite sure that he could get away with it. Now it was done.

Old Han had dutifully paid his insurance for years. Even when the place had fallen into disrepair and the money had stopped coming in, he had always made sure to keep the insurance policy up to date. He had a million dollars coming his way if he played things right. He cackled in the night as the glass windows on the front door cracked amid the heat of the conflagration.

Now he just had to get a divorce and life would be perfect. For the first time in decades, Old Han was truly happy.

Chapter 25: Ace is Number 1

Ace Fever, real name Shinji Tsukamoto, sat in a cinder-blocked jail cell wondering what was going to happen next. He rubbed at the bruise on his chest where the hillbilly had tried to bite him. His trusty leather jacket had proved to be stronger than the man's bite. The brawl in the club had been brutal, and at the end, the cops had pulled them all out of the club and sat them down on the curb. People were covered in bite wounds, bruises, and blood, and he saw the hillbilly, blood caking his face, being ushered to his own personal ride in the back of a squad car, gnashing his teeth and trying to attack the police officers.

With his bandmates by his side, Ace sat on his rear end on the sidewalk, smoking a cigarette and trying to plead with the cop standing over him. The police had spent a lot of time asking people their side of the story. In the end, the entire band had all been rounded up, along with some of the more violent rioters, and thrown into the back of a paddy wagon.

They had booked him, taken his fingerprints, and then ushered him down to a cell. Ace was glad that they hadn't bothered going back and searching their music equipment, or else they would have found the pile of cocaine that they had bought when they first hit stateside. Ace's high had long since dissipated, and he wondered where his tour manager was. How long was it going to be before he was bailed out?

The clanging of skull against bars shocked him out of his musings. The man across the way appeared to be trying to shove his way through the metal bars. His teeth were locked in a grimace, and his arms poked through the bars, reaching for him. Ace flipped the man off, but it did no good.

"Go to sleep, you bastard." The man merely snarled at him, reared back and smashed his head into the bars again. Blood dribbled down his sweaty forehead. Ace laid down on the hard metal cot that passed for a bed in his cell. He folded his hands behind his head and stared up at the ceiling, trying to ignore the man across the way.

He loved America and hated it at the same time. How could this be the land of the free if you couldn't even brawl in a bar? He wondered how his bandmates were doing. Hey Fever, or Tak as he had known him on the mean streets of Tokyo, was nursing a bloody lip in the back of the paddy wagon. Jungle Fever, whose name seemed to change every week, was examining a bite on his arm when they had come into the station. They had laughed and joked in Japanese as the cops took their fingerprints, but then they had all been ushered to separate cells.

At first, they had yelled and been in good spirits, but if they were feeling anything like him at the moment, they were coming down pretty hard from a night full of booze and coke. They hadn't even had a chance to get to the ladies yet. That was the best thing about America. You could throw a guitar over your shoulder, do a bunch of drugs, and at the end of the night you could head home with some random chick, do your thing, and head off to a different city, and do it all again. There was always a different city in America, and the women were different every time. Different features, different skin colors, different hair colors, even the vaginas were different. Ace closed his eyes, and dreamed of the future.

It wasn't long until the door to his cell clanged open, and the cops shoved another man into the cell. Ace sat up on his bed and looked warily at the man. He was sweating profusely, and he had a bandage over his neck.

The fat guard with the red goatee laughed and mockingly said, "Have fun, you two."

The man with the wound crawled to the other cot in the cell and groaned as he laid down. Ace examined him from the corner of his eye. He was long; he filled his cot to a greater extent than Ace did. He was thick too. This was not the type of man that Ace would want to tangle with. Ace was lanky and could throw a good punch, but his bony body was not made to take the kind of physical impact that this thick-boned man could most likely deliver. He wore dirty black work boots, a blue flannel sweatshirt and some well-worn jeans. His hair was short and brown, and he could see sweat on the top of the man's head where he was balding. He couldn't tell if the man was in his thirties or late forties.

The man coughed, and rolled over on his side. He spoke with the air of fever, "Hey, where am I?"

Ace didn't answer at first, hoping the man would just give up.

"Where am I?"

Ace tried to make his words as clear as possible; he hated having to repeat himself because of his accent. "You are in prison."

The man groaned and rolled over on his back. He moaned loudly, and said, "Why the hell am I out here? They attacked me! Goddamn, ignorant sumsabitches. They attacked me!" He wiped his hand across his brow and then hung his hand off the side of the cot. Sweat dripped to the ground.

Ace sat up on his cot, curious. It was one of his many flaws. "Who attacked you?"

"They did. A bunch of homeless people come up out of the park and began banging on my trailer. I tried to scare them off with a knife." The man waved his worker's mitts at the air, as if he were holding an imaginary knife. Then he turned to look at Ace. He was silent for a moment, and then he said, "Where am I?"

Ace ignored the repeated question, and instead posed a question of his own, "What did they want?"

The man swallowed, his prominent Adam's apple jigging in his throat. "They wanted to kill me. One of them crawled through the window and came after me. His hands were cold. I stabbed him in the gut with my knife. Right through the middle. He didn't do nothing, the goddamn, ignorant sumbitch."

The man sat up on the cot, his intensity growing. Ace could see the outline of his body on the sheets, formed from sweat. His face dripped with moisture as he continued: "I twisted it, and he still came after me. Took a bite out of my arm, and that's when I stabbed him in the throat."

Ace, his mouth hanging open, had never met a murderer before, at least not that he knew of. "Then what happened?"

The man's eyes rolled into the back of his head, and just when Ace thought he was gone for good, they focused on him. "He kept biting me. The cops showed up. Kicked down the door. Told me to freeze. But the pain... the biting. It was too much."

"And?"

The man focused on him again. "I stabbed him through the eye."

For a second, Ace almost asked if the man had died, but that was stupid. Of course he had died. He was lost in his own thoughts, when the man spoke again.

"You're one of them aren't you?"

Ace was taken aback. His mind, translating English into Japanese, couldn't quite figure out what the man was implying. The man on the cot across from him screwed his face up, and Ace knew what was coming next.

He got his hands up in front of his throat, just as the man launched himself at him. He was screaming at the top of his lungs, "You're one of them!" over and over. He kept trying to choke Ace, and it was all he could do to keep the man from getting a good grip on his throat.

"Help!" he screamed every time he managed to break the man's hold on his neck. They tumbled to the ground, and Ace's world was turned upside down. He was losing the battle. The man's rough hands seized on his throat, and no matter what he did, he couldn't break the man's hold. He could hear one of his bandmates, Hey Fever, screaming for help from a cell down the hall. His vision began to fade, the last sight he would see would be the face of the snarling madman across the hall, covered in blood, his arms outstretched towards Ace, as if he wanted to join in the fun.

Chapter 26: The Shopping Cart of Salvation

Mort's jog from the exploding police car had been as swift as possible. Blood streamed down his face, his elbow ached, and his knee had stiffened up to the point where he was hobbling. His body was covered in sweat, and his face stung where the sweat was seeping into the cuts on his forehead. He leaned up against a wooden fence that had seen better days. He had seen people moving about, heard sporadic shots of gunfire, and through it all he had kept moving, though the years of smoking and minimal physical activity had his lungs on fire.

He leaned against the rough grain of the now gray and somewhat wobbly fence, coughing up phlegm and spitting it on the ground. He had heard sirens, but they had always been heading away.

It began to rain, and Mort lifted his face to the sky to let it wash away the blood on his face. He wasn't bleeding badly, nothing that needed stitches, but the last thing he needed was for cops to see him with his face covered in blood. His bald head began to steam in the early morning rain. He closed his eyes.

Memories of his youth flashed in his mind. Hiding out in the night, away from Pop, his slurring voice yelling out in the night, "I'm gonna get you, boy! You bring your ass in here!" The patter of raindrops on the leaves around him, his heart beating in his ears, threatening to blow out his eardrums. It was a night like this that he had decided to leave, walking through the woods, and never looking back. He wondered how long it had taken Pop to sober up enough to realize that the last of his brood had finally left him alone in that shack in Louisiana, drinking and fighting the memories of his own youth.

He opened his eyes and focused them on a light in the distance, always moving, never stopping, as if Pop were going to find him one day. He put one foot in front of the other and walked towards the light. As he got closer, he saw that it was a 24-hour supermarket, the lights still on inside. There were a handful of cars parked outside, and as he walked up to the front doors, a man came out wielding a cart loaded down with water and tons of canned food.

Mort thought nothing of it, until the man saw him, skidded to a stop, and raised a handgun in his direction. Fear made his eyes bulge, and he could see the hardness in the other man's stare as he shouted, "Don't come any fucking closer, or I'll blow your goddamn brains out!"

Mort's hands came up instinctively, palms out to show he meant no harm. "Easy man."

The man steered the cart with one hand to the back of a pickup truck. He began tossing stuff into the back of it, one hand pointing the gun at Mort, and the other tossing his goods into the back.

Mort stood in silence, fearing the blackness at the end of the barrel of the gun that the man was holding. He was surprised to find that the fear was the same despite the fact that he was forty-years older than the last time someone had pointed a gun in his direction. At least this man was sane, not rambling about the devil and drunk out of his mind. Mort waited patiently. When the man tossed the last jug of water into the back of his truck, he waived his gun at him dismissively, and yelled, "Go on, get out of here. Find someplace safe." Then, without even looking at him twice, he hopped into the cab of the truck and drove away, his bald tires squealing as he accelerated on the rain-slick pavement.

The rain pitter-pattered on his head as he watched the lights disappear into the darkness. He looked inside the grocery store, and decided he could probably use a couple of things. Mort almost changed his mind when he walked into the front door of the grocery store. There, sitting in the entranceway was a dead body, a bullet hole through its forehead. The corpse belonged to a stock boy judging by the apron he had around his waist. He didn't know why he didn't just turn around, but something pulled him into the store.

The florescent lights hurt his eyes, and it took him a while to adjust. The place was virtually empty, just as it usually was at this time of the morning. Only this time, there were no employees to be seen. There were, however, signs of struggle. Boxes knocked over here, a forgotten shoe over there, but nowhere was there a person in sight. The hair stood up on the back of his neck, and he felt as if he were being watched.

From the back of the store he could hear banging. Mort crept silently, which was no easy task with a bum knee. He was more likely to be heard hissing through his teeth than taking a heavy footfall, but he did a pretty damn good job of moving quietly. He crept down the cereal aisle, putting random thoughts of the last time he had eaten cereal into the back corner of his mind. Why the hell were there so many cereals? Who could possibly need that much variety?

The banging got louder as he crept heel to toe, followed by a quick hop, down the aisle. It sounded as if someone were banging on a shutter. As he reached the end of the aisle, he slowly leaned out and peeked around the end cap.

The grocery store had a pharmacy. In the pharmacy, a woman cried as six of those things pounded on the iron shutters that secured the pharmacy after closing time. For a moment, his mind raced, wondering how to get the woman out of there. He could cause a distraction, giving her time to escape, but what then? He sure as hell wouldn't be running from any of those things, and if they were like the recently deceased cops that he had encountered earlier in the night, he would be done for. He was about to disappear down the aisle when the woman in the pharmacy spotted him peeking around the corner.

He could see her eyes widen in sudden hope, and even as he was shaking his head and putting his finger to his lips in a shushing gesture, she began screaming at him for help. Mort backed away in haste, knocking a box of cereal to the ground. A red-headed leprechaun looked up at him from the ground, mocking him. The gang of creatures at the shutters turned around to investigate the noise. It only took a second for them to give chase, and then Mort was shuffling down the aisle trying to get away from them.

He had a head start, but he knew that he was running a race that he had virtually no shot of winning. As he reached the halfway point of the aisle, he looked over his shoulder to see the first of them rounding the corner, arms out, knocking more mocking leprechauns to the ground.

He redoubled his efforts, but the tightness in his knee would only allow him to go so fast. He hoped that the woman in the pharmacy was able to get away; especially if he didn't manage to get away himself. At least then his death would be for something. The prospect was a damn site better than any demise he had ever envisioned for himself in his clearer more transcendental moments.

As he reached the end of the aisle, he could hear their snarls getting closer, their shambling footsteps outgaining his mad hop. Their sneakers squeaked on the bright, white linoleum. He silently cursed himself for not snagging cigarettes as soon as he had walked into the store, but then again, how was he supposed to know that an army of dead things were wandering around in the back? That asshole in the truck could have at least given him a heads up.

When  he passed through the automatic sliding doors, he felt the fingertips of the lead corpse brush his jacket. He turned around and confronted the snarling face; bloody furrows ran down the woman's face as if someone with sharp fingernails had tried to gouge her eyes out. Her long blonde hair clung to the blood, and Mort shuffled backwards. He felt his knee pop, and suddenly he could barely move. The woman reached for him and he shoved her away. She backpedaled clumsily before falling hard on her back. As she awkwardly attempted to rise, the crowd of creatures behind her parted and moved around her form as she were a rock sticking up in the middle of a river.

His knee was now composed of pure fire as he hopped on one leg. He looked everywhere for some sort of escape. More fingers brushed his back, and out of desperation, he put on a final burst of speed. He spotted his salvation in the form of a metal shopping cart. The fingers were brushing his back again, and despite the fact that it lit every nerve in his knee on fire, he forced himself to use his leg as if it were normal.

Mort ran for his life, screaming in agony, and wrapped his wrinkled hands around the red handle of the shopping cart. The cold metal was the most welcome sensation he had felt in a while. For the first time in a long time, he felt alive. Now he had to keep it that way.

Mort used his momentum to push the cart along. He put both of his feet on the bottom rail and leaned forward. The cart moved at a faster pace, although he could feel every pebble that the hard, rubber wheels rolled over in his knee. He chanced a look behind him, and he almost screamed in excitement to see the creatures losing ground.

The wheels on the cart started to slow. So he hopped onto the ground and ran some more, sending more pain through his knee. He couldn't keep this up either. Four quick paces, and he was done. He steered the cart towards the exit to the parking lot, and without looking for traffic, he rode into the street. The creatures were a good twenty paces away, but they were not looking to give up the chase.

In the distance, he could see that the road had an ever so gentle downwards slope. He just had to reach the apex of the road, and then it was all easy street, at least until he got to the bottom. The rain continued to fall. His head steamed in the night, and he knew this feeling... this feeling of having to escape or die. He had known it from the day he was born. It was what he was good at, escaping. If only these creatures had existed always, then he would be a god among men. But in a way, they had existed... except they had voices, smiling promising voices. In the end, they all wanted him dead, the ones with voices and the ones without.

Mort reached the precipice of the hill and hopped onto the bottom bar of the cart again. The acceleration was slow, but he simply couldn't use his knee anymore; at this point, he doubted if he would ever be able to use it normally again. The creatures gained on him, snarling, their wet shirts clinging to their bodies. Just as he thought they were going to outrun his cart and ruin his glorious escape plans, he began to pick up speed. The closest creature made a last grasp for him, and clawed at the air before hitting the ground face first in its exuberance.

Mort screamed in exultation as he gained even more ground. The wind on his face and every inch of distance made him forget about the raw fire that was crawling up his leg. He laughed loudly at the idea that a homeless man like him would save his own life by riding away on a stolen shopping cart.

He was almost to the bottom of the hill, when he noticed the truck from before had plowed into another car at an intersection. He was headed right for it. The shopping cart was going too fast for him to jump off without hurting himself even worse than he was. Mort clenched his jaw and rode the cart into the wreckage.

Chapter 27: The Mortician

Something bad must be happening up top. That's how Jim Jenks thought of the hospital above when he was stuck in the morgue. Twenty years, and he had never seen this amount of carnage in such a short amount of time. Thank God the city wasn't an attractive spot for terrorism. He hoped he would never have to deal with one of those situations. Though he was used to death and familiar with its many ugly faces, it still bothered him deep down in that part of him that he kept buried away during work. A body or two a night was something that he could digest... more than that, and the soft middle of his brain began to feel it.

When he was at work, the cold, calculating scientist part of his brain took over. Amid the smells of formaldehyde and decaying bodies, the part of him that was a father and a loving husband went away, saved from the horrors of a modern world where one wrong turn could turn you into an unrecognizable load of hamburger on a stainless steel metal slab. His stomach grumbled.

For a second, he thought longingly of his lunch. He didn't know where the stereotype of the creepy mortician with a sandwich hanging out of his mouth came from, but at the moment, he wished it was something that he could actually pull off. He hadn't been able to grab breakfast on the way into work. That was about four hours ago, and he had steadily been receiving and cataloguing deliveries all day. That's how Mortician Jim thought of them, as just deliveries to be prodded and then filed.

His latest was a man that had been ravaged in the Hospital's E.R. room by his own wife. At least that's what the orderly had said after they wheeled the body down here. The blooming red stain on the sheets let him know that what was underneath was going to be pretty gruesome. He sighed deeply and prepared himself for another round of "Things I Hope I Don't Dream Of Tonight."

He pulled the sheet back. The first thing that hit him was the smell of fecal matter. The second thing that hit him was the sight of the man grimacing in pain, his intestines piled on his midriff where a hole has been torn.

Jim pulled a fresh set of powdered latex gloves from a box. He snapped them on and then grabbed his trusty scissors from the metal tray next to the gurney the man was lying on. He began cutting the man's clothes free. The T-shirt was easy, but the jeans took a little work. When he was done, the wrinkled old man lay naked on the examination table, his white skin standing out in stark contrast to the blood that covered his destroyed abdomen.

Now it was time for his favorite part of the examination process... the writing of notes. Jim pulled his trusty pen from his pocket and walked over to his desk, where he kept the various forms of his vocation organized. He pulled out a thick form and began writing the required information down. His scrawl was almost unintelligible, but it was really the only way to do the job. He chuckled again about all of the public's misconceptions about his job.

If this were a movie, he would be speaking into a microphone while he began delicately carving on the corpse in front of him. Autopsies took time... in a movie, a recorder might seem handy, but sitting down to transcribe hours of recordings would be an egregious waste of time, especially since all of his reports were read, summarized, and distributed to multiple agencies throughout the city. Of course, in the movies, he would be examining something more exciting than a dead old man who was obviously the victim of some sort of fever-inspired cannibalism.

After he finished the preliminary work on the form, Jim pulled open his drawer and pulled a toe-tag out. He filled in the patient's name based upon the information that was found in the man's wallet. He walked over to the corpse and placed it over the man's big toe.

He screamed out loud when the old man sat up, his intestines becoming unbalanced and splattering to the floor. Mortician Jim's scientific mind was intrigued, while the family man inside screamed out in primal fear. Even as he backed away from the old man, his scientific mind was reasserting itself, stuffing his other self into a compartmentalized section of brain. His scientific mind's first course of action was to see if the man responded to any sort of stimuli.

"Are you ok?" he asked almost robotically.

The old man merely lumbered towards him, trailing bits of intestine.

"Can you hear me?" he asked, quite sure he already knew the answer to his question. There was no response, and this time the man was closer. A hypothesis was forming in the gray matter of his brain, but it was too crazy to even admit to himself. The man had been dead, of that he was sure. The victim had not been bleeding when he had come in... that's a sure sign of death, especially with the sort of wounds that he had. On top of that, his brief contact with the man revealed that his skin was cool to the touch. Despite all of these facts, Jim couldn't bring himself to believe the logical conclusion... the old man stumbling towards him was literally a walking dead man.

As Jim's mind began doing loops in his own cranium, the man was upon him. His wiry arms grasped him and tried to pull him closer. They struggled, and Family Jim came to the surface. He wanted to go home. He wanted this nightmare to end, and then it did. Jim's ankle became entangled in the old man's intestines, and he stumbled to the ground, hitting the side of his head against his own desk.

He was unconscious by the time he hit the floor, which saved him a lot of pain.

***

Slim had worked security at the hospital for decades, but tonight was the craziest night that they had ever had. Security guards were being called from all over the hospital to deal with different issues. Patients were attacking people all over the hospital. It was times like this that he was happy that he had drawn morgue desk duty over some of the more intensive security gigs.

The sight of the bodies being wheeled in body bags, under sheets, and sometimes in pieces had disturbed him at first, but he had gotten used to it. The basement of the hospital had a certain routine to it, a routine that allowed one to forget that he was essentially guarding dead bodies from the living and making sure no freaks got into the morgue and fiddled around with the dead. The only time he ever had any real trouble was when some family member demanded that they be let into the morgue.

That's why he was taken by surprise when Jim Jenks, a man he had known for decades stumbled up behind him and took a bite out of his neck. As his blood sprayed across his own security desk, Slim put his hand to his neck in disbelief. When he pulled his hand away, there was more blood and more spraying. He shoved Jim Jenks to the ground, and then saw another person down the hallway... a naked old man... with his guts hanging out.

Slim reached for his radio to try and call for help, but he fell to his knees. His brain was not receiving the amount of blood that he was used to... which is what tends to happen when someone takes a bite out your carotid artery. The radio was heavy in his hands, and he managed to press the button, but he couldn't figure out what to say.

His vision became spotty, and when Jim Jenks put his hands on him again, he didn't even think to fight. He was gone by the time the old man reached him. But he would be back.

Chapter 28: A Message to You Rudy

The sounds in the hallway had stopped fifteen minutes ago. When they stopped, Rudy hung up the phone; he had waited long enough. He had made sure all of the lights were off in his apartment, and now he crouched on the stained carpet, straining his ears for any sign that his nightmare was over. His heartbeat was all he heard.

Then his phone rang. The Super Mario Brothers' theme song shocked him into clumsiness, and he bobbled his phone several times before he could slide his finger across the screen to answer it. By then, the banging on his doorway had begun.\

"Hello?" he answered.

"Sir, did you call the police?" was the reply.

"Yes! God, yes! You need to help me. There are maniacs trying to break into my apartment!"

The dispatcher's reply was cool and calm, "Sir, can you tell me your address?"

Rudy rattled off the address as he crept up the hallway to his front door.

"What is your name?"

"My name is Rudy Lincoln. You guys need to get here now. I don't know how long this door is going to last." Rudy leaned forward and looked out the peephole. His British neighbor and the man with the messed up jaw were both banging on his doorway. It rattled in the jamb.

"Rudy, I need you to hold on," the dispatcher said in a voice that was meant to be soothing. "The police are on their way, but it's going to be a while. I need you to find something, anything, to barricade the door with."

Rudy was taken aback by the dispatcher's response. "Barricade the door? What am I? A fucking carpenter? How the hell am I supposed to barricade the door?"

The dispatcher took no notice of the growing panic in Rudy's voice. "Do you have something you can put in front of the door? A piece of furniture, a dresser, anything to slow them down. I need you to hold on, Rudy."

Rudy backed away from the door, and looked around his living room. He wasn't much of a furniture person. The only thing that would even be remotely helpful would be his La-Z-Boy. "I have a chair," he announced proudly to the dispatcher.

"That's good, Rudy. Can you block the door off with the chair?"

"I think so." Rudy put the phone down and then dragged his chair across his apartment and down the hallway that led to his door. Once it was in place, he grabbed his phone and plopped down in the chair to give it some added weight.

"I did it," he said, gasping for air. "How long until the police are here?"

There was no answer from the other end of the line. Rudy jumped as the pounding continued.

Chapter 29: Fixed-Gear Only

Dustin hopped on his bike and pedaled to where the explosion had lit up the night. He struggled to comprehend what he was seeing upon arriving there. A cop car was on fire. It had clearly been the source of the explosion, and yet, the occupants, who must have been in the car at the time of the explosion, were still stumbling around.

Their clothing was burned off of their bodies, and the masses of charred flesh stumbled blindly down the street. Dustin kept waiting to hear sirens, but there was nothing. Sheepishly, Dustin put his feet on the pedals and rode away. There wasn't much he could do, and things in the city had obviously gone from bad to worse. He could feel panic welling up in his chest. If a cop car could explode and burn for five minutes without the sound of sirens echoing through the night, then things were definitely out of whack.

Dustin was about a mile from home when he spotted another sign of something not quite right. A man clad only in pajama pants burst from the front door of a house. The shirtless man wasn't what made Dustin slow down and look at the man; it was the blood that covered his face and his mouth.

"Are you alright?" he called to the man from a safe distance.

The man began to approach him, giving no sign that he had even heard Dustin's question. Dustin shook his head and began to pedal away. At the intersection of the next block, he saw a car accident. The red sports car looked as if it had T-boned a woman in a silver Camry. The driver of the Camry appeared to be dead, as her forehead had most definitely been caved in on the steering wheel. Another bloody woman was struggling to get out of the driver's side seat of the sports car. The male passenger was trying to attack the woman in the driver's seat, but the seatbelt was holding it back.

At that moment, Dustin decided two things. He would help the woman in the sports car, but after that, it was time to get the hell out of Dodge. Dustin rode over to the car, and tried to open the driver's door. It wouldn't budge, so he lifted up his bike and smashed the window with the handle bars. He reached in and pulled the lady out, averting his eyes as her skirt came up past her thighs as she slid out of the window.

Immediately she grabbed a hold of him, and Dustin had to resist the urge to throw her to the ground out of fear. She clung to him, sobbing, and repeating "He's crazy!" over and over. Dustin looked over the woman's shoulder and saw that the man in the passenger seat was still struggling to reach the woman.

He held her at arm's length and looked into her eyes, "We have to get out of here. Things are very bad right now."

She nodded her head in understanding, so he continued, "Can you stand on a bike?" Dustin looked over at his bicycle, as did the woman he was talking to. It wasn't very impressive, but that's the way that Dustin had always liked it. Hand-crafted from the best parts he could scrounge, his silver glider didn't so much impress as it prevented any would-be thieves from taking it. It was a good bike, though it didn't look the part. The silver pegs on the back tires would give the woman plenty of space to stand if she could keep her balance.

Seeing Dustin's ride, the woman became somewhat hesitant. "You mean on that? Why don't we just call the cops?"

Dustin couldn't help the smirk that inched into the corner of his mouth. "Lady, about a mile back, I saw a cop car burning. No one was coming to help them. They've got bigger fish to fry tonight. If you want to wait around for your friend to unbuckle his seatbelt, be my guest, but I'm not going to sit around here and wait with you."

He waited as the words sunk into her head. When her eyes cleared, she looked at him, and said, "I think I'll wait for the police."

"Suit yourself, but you have to ask yourself one question... do you think they'll show up before that guy gets here?" Dustin pointed down the road where the shirtless man in the pajama bottoms had come shuffling down the street. The woman screamed and buried her face in his chest. He resisted the urge to laugh at this cliché moment of weakness. "C'mon, my apartment's not too far from here."

Dustin walked over to his bike, picked it up off the ground and straddled it. The woman looked at him doubtfully, and for the first time he noticed how attractive she was, despite the fact that her nose was crooked and blood was pouring down her face. The shirtless man down the street groaned loudly, and that made up her mind for her. She hopped on the back of the bike, and stepped on the pegs. Her arms gripped his shoulders tightly to the point of being painful. Together they took off into the night.

Chapter 30: Molly

Molly stared at the door to her cell. She had never imagined that she would wind up here, quarantined in the hospital that she had worked at for two years. She held her hand up in front of her, admiring the rough edges between her thumb and forefinger. The bleeding had stopped, and what was left was a bite-shaped wound with blackish-reddish edges. For a second, it looked like the overcooked inside of a marionberry pie. The bite didn't concern her as much as the heat that her body was putting out. The radiating red streaks that were inching their way up her arm from the bite wound were also somewhat concerning.

But, more than that, Molly simply wanted to eat. She banged on the door with her good arm. She pressed her face to the tiny square window, unbreakable glass reinforced by wire, and yelled, "Can I get some food in here?"

As had been the case for the previous hour, there was no answer. She pressed her face to the glass some more, angling her head to try and peer up and down the hallway as far as she could. To the left, she heard a door open. As two men in biohazard suits wheeled a gurney down the hallway, she completely ignored the bloody sheets and yelled at the men, "I'm starving! Pease bring me some food."

They didn't even bother to look at her. Either they couldn't hear her, or they didn't care. As she backed away from the window, she saw sweat from her forehead run down the glass. She plopped on the bed, and began rocking back and forth, her knees drawn up to her chest, her hair plastered to her head, and visions of people who weren't actually there dancing in her eyes.

She saw her grandfather, long dead, fiddling with an old black and white TV in the corner. "Put on the game," she said.

Her grandfather turned around to face her, only his face was rotten and blood dripped from his mouth as he smiled and said, "What game?"

Her grandfather melted away. She waved goodbye to him as she leaned back on the bed. Her body began convulsing, and Molly's eyes rolled up in the back of her head. She bit the tip of her tongue off, and then she was still. All that was left was the hunger.

Chapter 31: Observation

Joan watched Molly die from a monitor in her own cell. They called them rooms to patients, but they were obviously just cells. The cameras in her own cell allowed her to watch the patients without endangering the rest of the medical staff. She hated that she had to trick Clara and Molly into entering into quarantine, but if what she suspected was happening was happening, then it was obviously the lesser of the two evils. The other option was to let possibly infected people go out into the world and continue infecting other people.

Thoughts rolled around in Joan's head, piles of doubts and worst-case scenarios flitted about the edge of her rational mind. How widespread was it? What if she was wrong about everything? What if there had actually been some way to save Molly?

She didn't feel any different than she had this morning. She wasn't covered in sweat as Molly had been, but she had been in close enough contact with the infected to be a risk. The question was, "How long would she be a risk for?"

Her heart skipped a beat when she saw Molly convulsing. She had been a good nurse. Her bedside manner left a little to be desired, but she didn't deserve anything that was happening to her. Joan looked at her watch and paged the security guards.

The intercom in her cell was another perk that the usual quarantine patients didn't have. There was a knock at her door, and she pressed the button on the intercom to allow her to speak to the guards in the hallway. "The patient in room 231...," she hesitated as guilt gnawed at her conscience, "Molly, isn't doing too well. I need you guys to check her vitals."

"Can do," the guard in the hallway said. She didn't know him. No one knew any of the quarantine staff, except for the hospital director. It was protocol. The last thing you wanted was to have an infectious disease get out because so and so used to go drinking with this person, or that person was married to this person, and what would he tell his wife if something terrible happened? It was the hard reality, but the men used for this work were cold, scientific and completely impassionate about anything. When she had first suspected an epidemic of some sort of new disease at play, she had initiated the quarantine protocols even though she knew very well that this would mean being confined in a cell for an undetermined period of time. She was free to move about the quarantine wing, but she would not be leaving until she was sure she was fine.

But if what she thought was going on was going on, there was no place in the world that she would rather be right now than behind a locked door in a secure facility with a nice reinforced steel door to keep any sort of infection far away. Sure, there was a chance that the disease was airborne, but she didn't think that it was much of one. The old lady in the E.R. didn't have a scratch on her, but had merely been complaining of dehydration and illness. Her now dead husband had said that she had been sick for about a week, and he hadn't shown any signs of infection after being in close contact with her.

Of course, there was no way of knowing the gestation period of this particular bug. Was it a strain of flu or something completely new, a random mutation that struck the jackpot with a new brand of twisted lethality?

The men in the biohazard suits entered the room. The taller of the two checked Molly's vitals, while the smaller man held a submachine gun aimed at Molly. After checking her blood pressure, temperature, and pulse, the tall security guard looked up at the camera in the corner of the room and made a slashing gesture across his throat.

Joan was prepared for this, but she still felt a rush of blood to her face as she couldn't help but feel that some part of Molly's death was her fault. She hid her face behind her hands in an effort to keep from crying. When she pulled them away, the soldiers had left.

Joan stared at the screen, waiting for nothing to happen. She didn't know what she was doing. Waiting for her own body to start sweating? Waiting for Molly to miraculously spring to life?

She began again, examining all of the information that she had available to her. So far she had established, through conjecture and a limited amount of observation, that some sort of contagion was running around the city. The infection could be spread by a very weak airborne pathogen or by a seemingly more virile version of the pathogen that either lived in the victim's saliva or blood.

So she waited. What was that saying? You couldn't prove a negative? She wished the saying wasn't true. Joan checked in on Clara, who was in another cell. Numerous others had been quarantined as well, including the bitten security guards, numerous patients, and Miles the orderly who had initially pulled Clara's boyfriend off of Molly. These were the ones that were likely to develop the infection, along with herself.

Clara sat at the edge of her bed, her head in her hands. Things hadn't changed much. Joan almost felt a pang of remorse at her treatment of the woman. She had liked her well-enough, but when it came to the safety of patients in her hospital, nothing could be left to chance. Joan didn't have a lot of women friends; hell, she didn't have a lot of friends period. It's hard to keep friends when you have a fucked up schedule and a sense of duty that won't quit, but she had liked Clara right from the start.

If there was a chance that she could get Clara out of quarantine, then she would make it happen... although, she wasn't likely to like what she saw. Joan switched the camera's feed over to show Courtney's cell. He was still bound to the bed, his arms and legs struggling to free himself. She switched the channel again. Sick guards. Again. The crazy old lady bound to the bed. Again. More sick guards.

She cycled through all of the cameras and came back to Molly's room. This time a tear did come to her eye, but it had barely formed before it was forgotten.

"What the fuck?" The words tumbled from her mouth unbidden as Molly sat up and began banging on the door to her cell. Joan put her hand to her head to make sure she didn't have a fever. Either she was infected and hallucinating, or Molly had just risen from the dead.

Chapter 32: Boot Camp

Zeke didn't fight the cops as he was led into the station. There was no point in it, and honestly, he doubted the cops would believe a word he said after having heard the EMT's side of the story. The cops hadn't said more than a few words to him anyway. From the ever-present chatter on the radio of the police car, Zeke understood that it was kind of a busy night. He didn't realize how busy until he was shoved through the tall double-doors of the police station.

The place appeared to be a madhouse. Officers were rushing around the room. Benches were lined with people in various states of injury and dishevelment. A large bald man erupted from the back area, and began yelling at the cops who were escorting him, "Where the hell have you been? All hell is breaking loose out there, and you two are out for a joyride!" The cop made to answer the man, who Zeke assumed was the police chief, but he just rumbled right on over them, "Stow that man, and get your ass to the briefing room. We've got a lot of shit going down, and we don't have time to observe the formalities. Someone will take care of him."

One of the cops led Zeke to an open spot on a bench. Zeke plopped down, as the cops handcuffed one of his arms to a brass bar that was set into the concrete wall with heavy steel bolts. Without even saying goodbye, the two cops hustled out of sight and into a group of offices. All that was left were two officers doing booking and desk duty and a whole lot of people chained to a wall.

Zeke didn't like being treated the way he was being treated. Looking down the bench, he didn't think anyone else did either. All he wanted was to get booked, get a cot, and get some winks, because the way shit was going down, he didn't know how much longer it would be safe to sleep anywhere.

He rubbed his eyes with his free hand, and wished that this was the old days when a person could smoke anywhere they wanted to. He'd probably be issued a citation and be forced to put it out if he lit one up now. Oh well, they could bill his ass.

Zeke watched as the two officers at the desk tried to book an obviously drunk man at the main desk. One man was standing behind the prisoner, a man in a reddish-brown leather jacket, whose swaying was making it rather difficult for the two cops to get his fingerprints.

"Hold him still, Phillips," yelled the red-faced desk clerk.

Phillips, the booking clerk wrapped his arms around the prisoner in an effort to keep him from swaying all over the place, "God this guy smells like shit. Hurry up, will ya, Dan?"

Zeke pulled his pack of cigarettes from his pocket. He held them out to the man sitting next to him, a black man with a worried face and an air of shock about him. The only response from the man was a slow nod of his head as he declined. Zeke shrugged his shoulders as if to say, "Suit yourself," and then he pulled a smoke from the pack. In one smooth motion, he pulled his lighter from his pocket lit the cigarette, and leaned back against the wall. He would have let out a nice long, "Aaahhh," but the sensation was too good to waste on words.

The smoke billowed into the air hanging there like the soul of a dead man. He got two full, relaxed puffs out before the desk clerk noticed.

"Hey, what the hell do you think you're doing?" Dan yelled, his face looking like an undercooked sausage ready to burst.

Zeke waved at the man, and took another puff. The desk clerk re-focused on the task at hand, but Zeke heard him mutter something about a "goddamn zoo" and "not making enough to deal with this shit." He ashed on the tile floor with his free hand, when the black man next to him spoke up.

"It's all going down, man."

Zeke blew smoke out of his nostrils and ignored the man, but he kept speaking anyway. "This is it. This is the end."

Dan swore loudly as the drunk man knocked the ink pad off of the desk and onto the ground.

"What the hell are you talking about?" Zeke responded.

"Shit ain't right, man. The dead be up and walkin' around out there. These cops think it's some sort of game, but the shit is going down."

Zeke's first inclination was to tell the man that he was nuts. His second inclination was to start thinking of a way out of the police station. His third inclination popped into his head suddenly... about as soon as he saw the drunken man take a bite out of the clerk who had temporarily relaxed his grip on his ward to pick up the inkpad.

All chatter on the bench ceased as each one of the waiting men and women on the bench watched Dan pull his asp baton free and begin beating on the drunken man. The booking clerk, Phillips, screamed and thrashed, but the man didn't let go. With a scream, Phillips tore his arm away from the drunken man, but he was missing a good sized chunk of forearm. Dan moved his considerable girth around the desk and crushed the drunken man's leg with the baton. He fell to the ground, but still reached out for the clerk.

Just then there was another scream; this time, it was from the bench.

The black man next to Zeke leaned forward, obscuring Zeke's view, but the screaming and shouting intensified as one by one the men chained up on the wall saw what was happening. For a brief second, everyone aligned properly and Zeke saw a woman chomping on another man's throat at the far end of the bench. Blood sprayed the wall behind him, soaking into the gray concrete, as the woman gnawed on his flesh. She was as far away as she could possibly be, but Zeke immediately felt his instincts take over.

He stood up, and spun around. As awkward as it was, he was still able to put quite a bit of force into his first kick. The force of the kick jarred his chained up wrist and made the brass bar he was handcuffed to vibrate violently. Without looking at the other men on the bench, he yelled, "Help me!"

The black man to his right understood immediately, and he began to kick frantically at the brass rail as well. It was bolted into thick concrete walls. The chances of it breaking free of the wall were slim to none, but if enough of them worked on it, maybe they could all get out.

Zeke's wrist was numb. He took a deep breath and looked around the room for anything that might help. That's when he noticed that the desk clerk and the booking clerk were both lying on the ground, bite wounds covered their body, and the drunken man was still there, severely damaged, but feeding steadily, almost at a leisurely pace.

At the end of the bench, another round of screaming went up as the man who had long since died from his massive neck wound had sat up and was currently trying to get at the man that was cuffed next to him. The would-be victim was kicking as hard as he could, but the dead man clearly had no fear of his feeble and awkward kicks. Zeke imagined himself dead, chained to the railing for the rest of eternity with a bunch of other dead folks.

The thought allowed him to find energy reserves that he hadn't felt in years, not since basic training a lifetime ago. His mind wandered as he beat on the bar with the heel of his boot; the screaming of the men next to him was different, but all too familiar as well. He could hear the desperation in their screams, the exhaustion. These were the times that men were made of.

****

The sun beat down upon him. Drool dripped from his mouth. He was too tired to even keep his mouth closed. He was sucking wind through a throat that was raw, and his lungs burned with exertion. He was sure he was a beautiful sight.

Each shovelful of sand seemed to weigh a thousand pounds now. The blisters on his hands were pink where the layers of skin had been rubbed off. He could hear the grunts of the men next to him, all lined up in a row, and making the same pointless hole that he was. This is what happened when a man lost his sidearm on the beach during an exercise. Hopelessly lost in the sand, the drill sergeant decided that maybe it had gotten buried in all of the commotion.

He could hear his fellow soldiers grunting, panting, and retching all around him. In one case, he could hear crying. However, he was so deep in his hole that he couldn't actually see anyone. At this point, every shovelful of sand that was lifted over his head fell into a pile, and half of it drifted back into his hole. Sweat stung his eyes, and he thought about stopping to wipe his face with his arms, but he had already heard one recruit get dressed down for a "lack of proper shoveling form" when he had stopped to wipe the sweat from his brow.

His mind wandered, lost in the rhythm and the pain. Nerve endings fired his mind into oblivion, and when he could no longer see sunlight in the hole that he had dug due to the angle of the sun, the drill sergeant appeared at the edge of the hole and smiled down at him. "You lost something, sweetheart." The drill sergeant tossed his sidearm into the pit, and Zeke's head hung low. The drill sergeant disappeared from the precipice, but he could hear him as he walked away, shouting to the rest of the recruits.

"Fill 'em in, dirtbags. It looks like Rogers finally found his weapon. How it got so deep is a mystery for the ages, right up there with Easter Island and The Bermuda Triangle."

For a second, Zeke thought about just staying in the pit he had dug. It was only a five second hesitation, but it felt like an eternity. Then, after tossing the shovel up top, he climbed out of the pit using his blistered hands and noodle-like arms. He could feel the stares of the other men as he emerged from his hole. He never misplaced his sidearm again... and he had never been as exhausted as he was that day.

****

Until today. The bar's bolts rattled in the concrete, but there were fewer people kicking now. He had stopped briefly, to survey the situation behind him. Cops were trying to subdue the drunken man, the desk officer, and the booking officer. They had no trouble beating up on the drunken man, but trying to wrangle their own men seemed to be something of a task. Three of the seven people on the bench were dead now... kind of.

None of the police seemed to give two shits about them, even though the black man had been yelling for help for the last ten minutes. There were only three cops visible in the station, and this alone told Zeke how bad things had become. By now, with all of the things that he had seen and witnessed, the entire police force should be up and running. His black friend had been right; the shit was most definitely going down.

The fourth man on the bench was kicking at the man next to him, fending off his clumsy attacks, but he wasn't long for the world. He was old, overweight, and out of breath, and you could see each shove become slightly weaker than the last. Zeke kicked the bar again. Concrete dust tumbled to the ground, and he could see the bolts wiggle in their moorings.

He looked over his shoulder. The three cops, the chief and the two that had brought him in, were covered in bites, but they seemed to have the situation mostly under control. The bites were not good, and at this point, all he wanted to do was break the bar and run out the front door like a madman. When his black friend turned to yell at them, Zeke shushed him, "Don't even bother. They're dead already."

The man's eyes showed his understanding, and he redoubled his efforts, kicking at the bar furiously. The bolt on his side was loose, but was it loose enough? Zeke squatted down and indicated for his black friend to do the same. They sat down on the floor, their legs in the air, their arms wrapped awkwardly around the brass bar. With their legs they pushed against the wall, pulling on the bar with their arms. The concrete on Zeke's side cracked, and the bolt came loose. His black friend wasn't so lucky.

The bolt caught against the concrete, waving around loosely, but showing no signs of coming free. Zeke removed the loose bolt from the bar, and with a little painful maneuvering, managed to slip his handcuff past the square nub of metal where the bolt had secured it to the wall. His blood dropped to the floor, but he was able to slip the handcuff off the bar. He was free.

His friend looked at him, pleading in his eyes. Zeke felt the cold in his heart, the empty place where a lifetime of service had burned out everything that he had once been. He turned to leave while the cops were still busy with their friends.

He could hear his friend kicking as he slipped out the front door.

Chapter 33: The Last Tear

The pounding on the door hadn't slowed down or stopped. Each thump jarred Katie a little less, until it became more of a background noise than anything else. The human body can grow accustomed to anything, even the incessant pounding of an ill child who seems to want to kill people. No wait. He wasn't ill; he was dead. She knew that now. Even if she hadn't known it, she wouldn't have cared. He was as dead as dead could be, and her life would never be the same.

She had helped the old man to his bed, though he had screamed in agony in the process. There would be no running for him. She had to stifle a laugh when he told her that his name was Fred... Fred Walker. The irony was too much for her. That's when she knew her brain was changing, transforming into something alien... something better able to cope with the impending death that seemed to wait for her on the other side of the door.

Fred had an old, pea-green telephone sitting on his night table, but when she had tried to use it to call for help, there was nothing but a busy signal. They must have knocked the phone in the living room over in all of the commotion. She sat on the bed, heavy-hearted and trying to adjust to the new reality.

His covers were rumpled, and the old man grimaced in pain every time she shifted on the lumpy mattress. A picture of an elderly woman sat on the nightstand in a black metal frame. She smiled at the camera wanly; a younger version of Fred had a yellow sweater on, his arm loosely draped over the woman's shoulder.

"Is that your wife?"

The thumping at the door continued. "It was," Fred replied.

"Is she dead?"

The old man's Adam's apple bobbed in his throat before he answered, "Darla passed away a few years ago now. Cancer. She was fine one day, and then she got diagnosed. A couple of months later, and she was gone."

A tear found its way out of Katie's left tear duct. It would be the last one she ever shed. "Do you miss her?"

The old man sighed heavily. "They say it gets better as time goes on, but I won't lie. There isn't a damn morning that I don't wake up and miss every little thing about her. The smell of her hair. The warmth next to me." Fred laughed a little. "Hell, even the morning breath. I'd trade it all just for one whiff of that god-awful breath." His eyes drifted towards the ceiling. "Yeah. I guess I still miss her."

Katie had heard enough, "Do you have a cell phone? Anything?"

Fred shook his head. He had never felt like buying a phone. Truth be told, he didn't have a whole lot of people to call.

"Does that radio work?" she asked, pointing at an old digital clock radio. It must have been from the '80s. It had a nice fake wood finish, some dusty buttons, and a bright red, digital display.

"Every morning for the last 25 years or so."

Katie began to fiddle with the radio. She turned the dial, inching it along until she found something that wasn't music, or what passed for music on the radio these days. The first station she found was a religious channel. The man on the radio was rambling about Judgment Day, sinners, and hellfire... it was business as usual. The second station she found was a little better. It was a news report.

The man on the radio spoke in his news reporter voice, confident, deep, and somehow soothing. She took a deep breath as she caught the flow of his words, the thumping on the door almost fading into the background completely.

"Reports of widespread violence are dominating the headlines this morning. Some doctors are reporting some sort of plague..."

The reporter marched on, speaking of disaster after disaster. The names of the towns were numerous. The entire country seemed to have woken up crazy, almost overnight, but it wasn't just the good old U.S.A. that was having trouble. Canada, Europe, and even Asia had all experienced their fair share of horror stories. Each description seemed more shocking than the next, but perhaps the most disturbing thing for Katie was the fact that no one seemed to have any idea what was going on.

They brought on a scientist to pontificate on the nature of this new disaster, and all he did was make educated guesses about what could possibly be going on. In short, he knew about as much as Katie did. All she knew was that the situation was sounding pretty damn grim.

"Do you have any weapons in the house, Fred?"

Fred smiled, his yellowed teeth gleaming in the dark. "Now what kind of lonely old man would I be if I didn't have a gun stashed away somewhere?" He raised one of his leathery arms off of the bed and pointed to his closet. "There's a safe up there. Top shelf."

Katie walked over to the closet which was full of a lot of flannel, jeans, and some old dress clothes shrouded in plastic. Up top she saw a safe with a combination lock. The combo was simple enough. It was his wife's birthday. Once she dialed in the third number, she lifted the handle and swung the door open. Inside was a silver handgun and a box of ammunition. She handled the weapon awkwardly, not used to its deceptive weight and the impending doom that could burst forth from the barrel at any given second.

"Don't worry about it. It's not going to go off. I never keep the thing loaded, and there's a lock on the trigger. Bring it here."

Katie brought the gun to him, her hands shocked by the weight and the coldness of the handgun. Fred reached into the nightstand next to his bed and pulled out a tiny key on a silver, beaded chain. He unlocked the trigger lock and set it down on the nightstand. Carefully, he opened the cylinder,  "You see? Like that." He then popped the cylinder back in place and handed the gun to her, butt end first.

The handle was black and criss-crossed with diamond patterned plastic. She held the gun in her hand, and fumbled with the revolver until she managed to pop out the cylinder.

"Now look on the left side of the revolver. You see that lever?" She nodded her head. "That's the safety. If you're running around and you don't want to shoot your foot off, it's best to have that in the on position. Get used to the feel of it."

Fred fumbled with the box of ammunition. On it was the image of a bald eagle, soaring through the air, claws extended and wings spread wide. He pulled six brass cartridges from the box, and handed them to Katie. "Load it up."

Katie did as she was told. On the radio, the newsman droned on, "Reports from England claim that they have shut down all international travel. Whether this is a quarantine measure or a result of a collapsing infrastructure is still unclear..." Katie slid the last bullet home and then closed the cylinder.

Katie jumped as the thumping at the door became louder. It sounded like there were two people outside. The door shook in the jamb.

Fred smiled at her. "It looks like we've got a decision to make."

"What do you mean?"

"I ain't goin' nowhere. Not like this. But that's not the question. The question is, 'Are you going somewhere, and if so, are you prepared to do what you have to do?'"

Katie looked at the door. It rattled some more, and the wood in the middle of the door began to splinter. She looked at the gun in her hand, hefting it. She could end it all here. The safety was off. It wouldn't be that hard.

A fist thrust its way through the door, catching on splinters that scraped the flesh off the arm. She recognized the wedding ring on the grasping hand. A simple gold band, cutting into the swollen dead flesh of her husband's hand. The creature that was her husband pulled the hand back and there was more pounding. Katie moved to the far corner of the room, away from the door.

The lock splintered, and the door flew open, and standing before her was her former family, her former life, mocking her with blood-stained shirts, gnashing teeth and outstretched hands. She lifted the gun with both hands and pulled the trigger.

The first shot tore through the drywall to the right of the door. She didn't know if she had missed on purpose or because she wasn't ready. The sound was deafening, and the kick of the gun caught her by surprise, but she managed to keep from dropping the gun. She fired again, punching a hole in the stomach of her husband, but he merely advanced as if nothing had happened.

With her ears ringing, Katie fired again. This time it hit her husband in the chest.

"Go for the head, Katie," Fred said gently as he pulled himself to the other side of his bed, as far away from her family as he could.

Katie lined up the shot, and squeezed the trigger. She screamed as the bullet entered her husband's forehead. He fell face forward onto the floor, exposing the spot where the back of his head should have been.

Her hands jittered as she tried to line up Kevin for the same fate, but her next shot went wide, grazing his neck. Kevin didn't seem to care. Painfully aware of Kevin's proximity and the fact that she only had one bullet left, Katie took her time lining up the next shot. The bullet shattered Kevin's chin, and left a gaping mess hanging there, but Kevin kept coming.

Kevin reached the bed and crawled after Fred who thumped onto the ground on the other side at Katie's feet. Katie wasn't aware of Fred's screams of pain as she popped open the cylinder and dumped the empty cartridges onto the ground. She grabbed the box of ammunition and began trying to stuff a random bullet into the cylinder. Her fingers were clumsy and the cartridge fell out of her hand as Kevin reached for Fred, shreds of flesh hanging from his missing chin.

Fred's screams intensified as Kevin pounced on him. Katie grabbed another bullet and finally managed to drop it in the chamber. She stalked over to Kevin as she slammed the cylinder closed. She pulled the trigger but nothing happened. Kevin was grinding his upper jaw into Fred's defending forearm, as she cycled through the empty chambers in the gun. Finally, she hit the right chamber, and Fred's face was splattered with the blood of her two-times dead son.

The room was silent but for the continuous drone of information from the clock radio, "Some reports are claiming that... the assailants appear to be reanimated corpses."

Katie walked quietly into the living room to see the door thrown open. As she walked over to close the door, she saw that there were more people in the street, and they were walking towards the house. She closed the door, as quietly as she could, but the handful of people in the streets were slowly making their way towards the house and the lock on the front door was busted. They knew they were there, hiding inside the house. There were only two ways this was going to play out.

Katie hung up the phone in the living room, before she went to check on Fred. She popped open the cylinder easier this time, and as she began stuffing bullets into the revolver, she said, "I got some good news, and I got some bad news."

Fred, lying on the floor and nursing his arm, laughed, "There's good news?"

"Well, relatively speaking."

Fred sat up and groaned in pain. "Alright, let's hear it."

"The good news is that there are no more of them in the house. Whatever they're talking about on the news is obviously happening here. The bad news is that there were more of them in the street when I looked outside... and they're headed this way."

Fred's smile finally faded from his face. Katie watched the wheels turn in his head, and then he made his decision. "Hand me the phone."

Katie picked up the receiver and handed it to him. He dialed 911, and waited patiently. There was no answer, just a recorded message that had been heard a thousand times already that night.

In the other room, the front door banged open. Fred's head sagged, before he said, "You have to go."

Katie didn't say anything. There wasn't anything to say.

Fred looked around his room, "I can't say I'll miss the place."

Chapter 34: Quarantined

Clara sat in her room examining her surroundings. There wasn't much to examine. Her mind wandered to Joan. The plans that came to her mind were violent, brutal. She wanted to smash her face in. She wanted to see her lying on the ground bleeding. Most of all, she wanted to be out of the room. Clara could hear banging on doors, and a couple of minutes ago, she could have sworn that she had heard gunshots coming from somewhere in the hospital.

No one had visited her for hours. Clara had no idea what time it was; she had lost all sense of time when she had fallen asleep. She didn't feel like she had slept for long, but she had slept long enough to dream. They hadn't been good dreams either. Courtney was in them, only it wasn't Courtney; it was the monster that he had become.

The door to her room, her cell, opened and a man in a biohazard suit came in with a tray full of food.

"What's going on out there?" she asked him. There was no answer, just an implacable stone-faced disregard for her that made her barely contained rage rise to the surface.

The man placed the tray on the bed table, and then made to leave.

"Where is Joan? I need to talk to her." The man hesitated at the name of Joan, but then he walked out of the room, shutting the door behind him. For a second, Clara had the desire to throw her food at the door like some sort of petulant child who had not gotten her way. But that's not what she needed at the moment; what she needed right now was a plan and some food.

She looked at the tray of food. It was hospital food, but it was good enough for her. She sat in a chair next to the table and picked up a grilled cheese sandwich. It wasn't as good as her mother had made, but it did the job. The tomato soup was a little watery for her taste, and what she really wanted was a beer. She made do with the tiny cardboard carton of chocolate milk, which made her feel like she was back in elementary school.

She was onto the second half of her sandwich when she heard more gunshots, only this time they were closer. They sounded as if they were right down the hall. She wished her room had a window. She stood next to the door, listening to the sounds in the hallway. There was shouting but she couldn't make out the words. She knew this would probably be her best chance to escape.

Clara stalked over to the bed table and dumped her food on the floor, sparing a second to bemoan the image of the second-half of the grilled cheese sandwich lying on the speckled, white linoleum. The tray was hard tan plastic. It wouldn't be as good of a bludgeon as a steel tray, but that might be part of the reason why they didn't use metal. She hefted it in her hands. It was awkward, but it could do some damage if she swung it right.

More gunshots. Clara could hear her pulse in her ears as adrenaline kicked in. She shook while she waited. The shouting was clearer now, she could almost make out words.

The door sprang open and Clara brought the tray crashing down on the intruder's head. It broke in half and Joan tumbled to the ground unconscious.

Clara spared her a single glance, and successfully prevented herself from kicking Joan's teeth out of her now bleeding skull. It was hard, but she needed all the time she could get.

She poked her head into the hallway to see what was going on. A group of men or women in biohazard suits, it was hard to tell which, were standing shoulder to shoulder firing into a group of people. Clara's hand flew to her mouth at the callousness of the act. She had to get out of there now. But, as she stood in shock, she couldn't help but notice that the patients that were advancing upon the group were not falling down dead. Wounds appeared, fingers and hands flew off, bullet wounds blossomed on their chests, but they kept coming.

Unfortunately, they were also blocking off the exit. She looked down the other direction and saw nothing of promise, just more rooms with doors. Courtney was behind one of those doors, but she suspected that he was lost to her forever. Of course, if she didn't figure a way out of here, she might be lost forever as well.

At her feet, Joan groaned as she sat up. She wobbled to her feet and then fell over. Clara did not lend her a hand. "Do you know of any other way out of here?"

Joan stood up groaning and stumbled to the doorway. She looked out into the hallway where the men in the biohazard suits were busy trying to fend off at least fifteen patients who seemed to want nothing more than to kill them. Clara cringed as she saw one of them go down under the weight of three patients. His suit was shredded and ripped in no time. It was great at keeping out bacteria and viruses, but a human hand intent on destruction was no match for the thin material.

The other men in suits backed up slowly. Apparently, there wasn't much camaraderie among the security detail. There were only three of them left, and one of them was out of ammunition.

Clara moved silently as Joan grabbed her arm and pulled her down the hallway. "Follow me," she whispered.

Clara's first instinct was to put her fist through Joan's face. The last time she had followed Joan was the reason she was stuck in the hospital with a bunch of murderous freaks in the first place. She didn't follow through on her urge. There were larger concerns to worry about. Joan ushered her into an office and then closed the door behind her. There was the sound of air hissing and Clara's ears suddenly filled with pressure. The light on the door's locking mechanism turned from red to green, and Joan collapsed in a wheeled office chair.

"Would you like to tell me just what the hell is going on?" Clara asked. Gunshots rang through the halls outside, still painfully loud despite the walls around them. Joan ignored Clara and began fiddling with a remote control. A bank of monitors sprung to life, and Clara's mouth dropped open as she watched the carnage on the screens.

"I'm saving your goddamn life. That's what's going on," Joan spat at her.

Clara plopped down on the cot in the corner of the room, her mouth open and incapable of making any sort of sound. She heard the screams in stereo, through the speakers on the monitors and through the walls. The patients in the hallway tore through the three remaining men in biohazard suits. The last one died just outside the office that they were hiding in. He beat upon the door as the patients ripped his suit into shreds and then did the same to his body.

Clara and Joan sat in silence. The patients meandered around the quarantine wing, looking for something, but there was nothing to be seen. Soon the crowd thinned out as the patients continued on to greener pastures.

"Joan, what is going on?"

Joan put her hand up to silence her and then she pointed at the monitor. "Look."

The last man to die began to move around. Though he was missing half his face, an eye, and the lower part of his left arm, he began to rise. Clara couldn't believe what she was seeing. When he began pounding on the door with his stump of an arm, she finally acknowledged that she just might have lost her mind. When the other security guards rose up and joined him, she became positive of the fact.

Chapter 35: The Long Way Home

Old Han cackled in his beat-up, gold Daewoo Espero. It was the first car that he had managed to buy in America, and it was the only car. It wasn't Chinese, but Korean was the next best thing. The last thing he wanted to do was give the lazy Americans any more of his hard-earned money. He didn't mind that the car barely ran and that replacement parts for the defunct car manufacturer were hard to find, especially when one was using broken English to describe what one needed.

He reached for the car stereo, and turned up the sound on the tape deck. Black Panther's delightfully glammy metal jams blared on the radio, a message from the early '90s Chinese rock band still struggling on in a Korean car driven by a Chinese man in America. Old Han laughed at how wonderful the world was.

As he moved through the city, away from his burning bar, he came to a stop at an intersection. He was frightened out of his daydreaming by a blood-soaked woman's hand pounding on his window. Blood poured from her forearm, and Han could see figures chasing after her.

He stepped on the gas, his car sputtering down the street, the muffler jangling around, ready to fall off at the next speed bump. Han swore in Mandarin. He swore more when he saw that she had left a bloody handprint on his driver's side window. He was half tempted to turn right around and run the lady over. They were probably on some drug-fueled binge, her and her multiple boyfriends. Americans were like that. Gross, immoral, and riddled with addictions.

When Han had to stop at the next intersection, it was because it was clogged with traffic. People were honking and shouting as three men struggled amid some car wreckage. Han waved his hand in dismissal and backed the Daewoo up. He knew another route. It was a dark alley, filled with potholes, but it would take him around the clogged intersection. He sucked in a breath of air as his muffler scraped the ground after a vicious pothole.

Somehow, the Daewoo made it through the forgotten and unkempt alley, only to be confronted by a crowd of people advancing down the  next street. It was at this point in time that Old Han finally realized that something out of the ordinary was going on. The group of people marching toward his car were all injured in various ways, some stomach-churning to see. There were only two choices, drive forward and plow through the people, or drive backwards and risk destroying his car.

Old Han decided to wait and see what would happen. He didn't see any weapons; maybe they would just move on. Just in case, Han reached into his glove box and pulled out a pistol. As the gang approached, he shrunk in his seat. When the first of the group did not pass the car, he knew he was in trouble. A man in a gray sweatshirt began pounding on the driver's side window, while another man began pounding on the other side. Soon, more had joined in the pounding. He felt the car begin to rock back and forth.

"Motherfuck it." Old Han stepped on the gas. Bodies flew left and right, but Han still couldn't see as there were three people clinging to the hood of his car. He swerved to the right, and two of them fell off to the side. His view was still obstructed however, as a man with an eye hanging by a scrap of tendon still clung to the hood of the Daewoo. Han swerved to the left this time, and his car hopped the curb, drove on the sidewalk for a few yards, and then thumped back onto the street.

He screamed triumphantly at the top of his lungs as the last man rolled off of his car. The noise in the car was deafening, as his muffler had dropped off when he jumped the curb. The loud sputtering of his engine exploded throughout the early morning air, echoing through streets teeming with the dead. As Han sped on, he kept his pistol in his lap. He rocketed down the streets, heedless of speed limits. He saw it now. The destruction, the wandering people. His eyes had finally opened. He had to dodge several grasping sets of arms reaching for his car as he weaved through the city streets. He avoided oncoming cars, doing their own swerving. In one yard, he saw a man with a shotgun firing into a group of people. He continued on.

When he finally pulled into the driveway of his single-level ranch home, his hair had escaped its ridiculous comb-over. It stuck out every which way. With his pistol in his hand, he turned off the car and sprinted toward the front door. He pulled his giant key ring out and searched frantically for the right one. He found it and burst through the front door of his house. He slammed the door shut behind him and locked the door. He was standing there looking out the blinds when his wife came up behind him.

He could smell the sickening stench of her perfume before her arm snaked around his waist. He could feel the saggy meat of her breasts against his back. The feeling revolted him.

"What are you looking for?" Fang asked in perfect English.

Han ignored her and kept peering out the window through his thick-lensed glasses. They must have been thirty-years-old, but the glasses were all that he had left from China... that and his repugnant wife. There... at the street corner. He saw two, maybe three people walking down the street. They must have been drawn to his house by the  thunderous noise of his muffler-less Daewoo. He backed away from the blinds, and shoved his wife away.

She looked at him with hurt in her eyes. She always had that look. It infuriated him.

"What's wrong?" she asked.

Han ran his hands through his thinning hair, causing thin wisps of it to stand up in even crazier directions. "Have you heard anything weird tonight?"

"Weird? What do you mean?"

"I mean crazy people. Running around, hurt."

Fang look confused. "I was sleeping for most of the night. What's going on?"

Han dismissed her with a wave of his hand and walked over to the couch. He plopped down on the couch, annoyed by the divot his wife's ass had made in the couch over the year,  and reached for the remote. He turned on the TV. While he waited for it to warm up, his wife plopped down on the couch next to him, crowding him with her body, her perfume snaking its way up his nose.

The picture finally showed up on the TV, and he flipped the channel to the news. They sat in silence as the pictures flitted across the screen. His wife inched closer and closer to him as horrifying image after horrifying image flashed across the TV. Things were bad, very bad. For the first time in a long time, he didn't mind his wife's touch. He welcomed it.

He looked at his wife and kissed her, not the cold American kisses that they had shared for the last few decades, but the hot kiss of their youth. Who knows what would have happened next had the window not burst open and the maimed corpse of an American youth begun crawling through the window.

Chapter 36: This Old Cell

Ace heard the door to his cell clang open, just before he blacked out. When he awoke, he awoke to a strange sound that was barely audible underneath the buzz of the cellblock's yelling. It sounded like a cat eating wet cat food, smacking its lips together. Ace almost faded out, as he thought of his cat at home, a small, orange beast with a crooked tail being watched by his mother. His fans would get a kick out of knowing that he still lived at home with his mother and a cat. The only thing that stopped him from fading out completely was that the noises were much too loud for a cat to be making them.

He opened his eyes and groaned. His throat was bruised and raw. As he sat up on his cold metal cot, he saw his cellmate kneeling over something with his back to Ace. It took a while for his eyes to adjust, but then the face of the cop with the red goatee came into focus. His eyes stared up at the ceiling... lifeless.

Suddenly, Ace was no longer a fan of America. Blood ran from the cop's mouth, and Ace could only think of one thing to do. He stood up, barely able to steady himself on his legs. He would only get one chance, so he waited silently until he felt like he was ready. When he had built up the courage, he charged at the back of the feasting man and dropkicked him in the back as hard as he could. The man went skidding across the floor and out of the cell. Ace popped to his feet, wobbling unsteadily as the blood was still trying to refresh his brain. He grabbed the cold metal bars of the cell door and slid it closed with a clang.

He was just in time too. He had to spring backwards to avoid his cellmate's outstretched arms reaching for him through the bars. He hung just out of arm's reach and studied his cellmate's face. His mouth was covered in blood, and he could see bits of flesh stuck in the man's teeth. His eyes were glassy and unfocusing. Ace flipped him off, but it was as if he was invisible to the man, except for the fact that he was clearly hungry for seconds. Over his cellmate's shoulder, he could see the man in the cell across the hall reaching for him as well, his face pressed against the bars.

Ace bent over the mutilated jailor. The smell of his insides was pungent, and he had to fight to keep from gagging. The roar of the cellblock was deafening. With his hand over his mouth and nose, he dropped down to his knees and searched the guard's body. Today, was his lucky day... if a day filled with murder and violence could be considered lucky. The jailor still had his keys on him. Twenty keys on a ring, but no gun, and a guest just outside the door who could throw him around like a ragdoll if he got close.

Ace was formulating a plan when the guard grabbed a hold of his arm and began pulling it to his mouth. Instinctively, Ace cracked the guard across the jaw, but still the man clung to him. Ace got off of his knees and yanked his arm away from the guard.

"Hey!" he yelled, not knowing what else to say, his English temporarily failing him. He backed away from the guard, bumping into the far wall of his cell. The guard managed to get to his knees, the shreds of his intestines flopping on his brown guardsman pants. "Stop!" Ace yelled.

The guard advanced on him, and out of sheer panic, Ace spun and landed a hard kick on the guard's face. The guard toppled to the ground. For a moment, Ace was concerned for the man's health, and then he realized that the man was in fact dead. The blank stare, the gaping gut wound, it all made sense to him.

As the guard rolled over and tried to get to his feet, Ace pounced on the man's back, grabbed his head and began pounding it into the concrete floor of the cell. The guard was helpless, and when Ace had finished, the guard's forehead was caved in and the ground was covered in blood. He stood, shining with sweat, and let out a ragged sigh.

He looked into the hallway, and his former cellmate was still there, still clawing at the air and trying to get to him. Now he had to deal with him. Ace rummaged through the guard's pockets, coming up with nothing more than a collapsible baton. No gun. No taser. Just a solid piece of metal that wasn't very likely to deter his former cellmate.

Ace flung his wrist out, flicking the collapsible baton so it opened. He took a swing at the concrete walls of his cell. A small flake of the concrete wall flew off. The baton was heavy and weighted properly, but it was going to take one lucky hit to take out his cellmate.

The air whistled as Ace approached his cellmate and swung the baton in a  downward arc. The baton glanced off one of the steel bars, robbing it of its impact. The man on the other side of the bars appeared to feel nothing as the metal baton bashed into his shoulder. For a second, Ace wanted to just stab the baton at the man's eye and kill him outright, but the collapsible nature of the baton wouldn't allow it, so he continued to swing away.

Despite the fact that he could play guitar and belt out songs at the same time, in virtually every other facet of his life, Ace was not considered agile. It took him about twenty swings to finally land a solid blow to his cellmate's head. In the meantime, the noise in the hallway had increased, and people were shouting up and down the hallway.

He had trouble making out the words of the other prisoners, but then he heard gunshots from the entrance to the cellblock. Ace swung the baton harder and faster, desperation lacing every swing. The din in the hallway rose higher and higher, and then there were more gunshots. Just as he was about to deliver another swing at the man, the side of his cellmate's head exploded, blood splattering the concrete floor of the hallway. Ace stood there, his arm raised in the air, and for some absurd reason, he stared at the puddle of blood oozing out of his former cellmate's skull... trying to make a shape out of it, as if it were a cloud floating in a blue spring sky. It looked like a fish he decided, a fish with its guts spilling out.

As he stood there, trying to come up with another shape, two men ran down the hallway, guns in their hands.

A pudgy cop in riot gear began yelling at the prisoners, "If you're alive, yell your name, otherwise we will shoot you. I repeat, if you are alive, yell your name, otherwise I will shoot you."

The shouting became more intense. The voices of the panicked prisoners reverberated off of the concrete walls, echoing back and forth and building in intensity.

The pudgy cop's partner stopped in front of Ace's cell. He looked at Ace with suspicion in his eyes and his gun raised.

"Ace! My name is Ace! Ace! Ace!"

The cop seemed satisfied.  Then he noticed the jailor on the floor, a blood puddle expanding from his split melon. "What the fuck is that?"

"He try to kill me," Ace pleaded. The cop aimed his gun at him as Ace continued to yell, "He tried to eat me!"

Just when it seemed like the cop was going to pull the trigger, the man that had been bashing his head against the bars for the last two hours, reached through his bars of his cell and yanked on the cop's satin police jacket. He managed to squeeze off a round that zinged by Ace's head. Hot fire ran down his cheek.

"I got one!" the cop announced to his partner as he slipped out of his jacket and away from the grasp of the man in the cell.

"Well, then take him out," his partner yelled.

Ace was still in shock when the cop pulled the trigger. Despite everything he had seen that night, he still felt fear gurgle in his belly as the cop put a round through the head of the man across the hall. He slumped to the ground, his face still pressed against the bars, and blood running down his face, dripping onto the concrete floor.

The cop continued down the hallway, Ace momentarily forgotten. Ace flinched every time there was a gunshot. That could have been me, he thought. He held his hand to his bleeding cheek and hoped his bandmates were yelling out their names, but he couldn't tell over the din of noise coming from the cells.

When the cop had checked every cell, he came walking back through the hallway. "Stay in your cells. We have an emergency situation. If you stay in these cells, you will be safe. We will be back in an hour to check on you. Especially you, buddy boy," he said as he strode past Ace's cell.

As the cop disappeared from sight, Ace could hear the man repeating his message, and then they were gone, both of them. Noise still flooded the cells. People were yelling for help and asking questions. "Stay in your cells," the man said again, slamming the door shut behind him.

Fuck that.

Ace pulled the key ring off the jailor and began plugging the keys into the lock on his cell, one by one. The last thing he was going to do was sit in a cell with a rotting corpse, waiting to be executed. He didn't know what was going on outside, but this was most definitely not normal... even for America.

Chapter 37: Hot Chops

Mort's landing had not been soft, but thankfully, it had not done any further damage either. His body had flown over the top of the shopping cart as it collided with the bumper of the red truck. He laid there for a second, trying to figure out if he had hurt anything in the fall. His knee was still on fire and his elbow still ached, but the cuts on his face had finally stopped bleeding. He did have a nice case of road rash on his side where he had tumbled across the pavement, leaving some of his skin behind.

He sat up, and managed to stand on his one good leg, his other dangling gingerly, just barely touching the ground. He looked back up the hill he had come down, and saw shapes moving underneath the streetlights. They were coming. He didn't have much time. He hopped over to the truck and saw the man from the grocery store. His forehead was curved the wrong way thanks to the steering wheel of the truck.

Mort looked at the other car, and didn't imagine that things would be much better on the inside of that car, as the entire front of the sedan had been ripped off by the diesel beast of a truck. Mort fumbled around in the man's pockets, searching for his gun. No luck. Then he noticed a glimmer of silver on the floor of the truck. He reached for the shine and pulled out the man's handgun. It was heavy in his hands.

He backed away from the car, holding the gun gingerly and trying to avoid tripping over the cans of food that littered the street. His only thought was of escape. He looked at the gun in his hand, and for a moment, he was tempted to put the barrel in his mouth and take the simplest way out. But that's not who he was. He wasn't a quitter, and if he had been, he would have been dead a long time ago.

Behind him one of the cars caught fire. That was a good enough sign for him to move. Mort hobbled down the street, looking for anywhere to hide. There were plenty of ramshackle houses along the street, but the last thing he wanted to do was break into a house and hold people at gunpoint. He settled on a small restaurant named Hot Chops.

It was a two-story house that had been converted into a business. Ten wooden steps climbed up to the first floor of the house. He limped up the steps, each flex of his bruised knee bringing more agony. He looked over his shoulder and back down the street. They were gaining ground. Soon, the dead would be at the vehicles he had left behind.

As he reached the second floor landing, Mort put his face to the windows to see if he could see inside. It was pitch black inside. Using the butt of the gun, he smashed in one of the windows and then cleared away the glass. He crawled inside, grunting in discomfort as he tried to maneuver his injured leg through the window with the least amount of pain. Once he got inside, he laid there, catching his breath and waiting for the pain to subside.

He listened for footsteps or any other sounds of alarm, but there were none. When he was satisfied that no one was going to come and shoot him in the back, he rose to his feet and looked out the window. He was just in time to see the burning car explode. It wasn't a huge explosion, but he felt the force and heat from it down the block, and the sound was deafening. Car alarms erupted in a cacophony of wailing throughout the neighborhood.

Shadows stumbled in front of the fire, outlined against its brilliance as they moved down the street and towards his hiding spot. Flame-engulfed figures emerged from the conflagration and stumbled after them. A man with a hunting rifle burst out of the front door of one of the houses next door. With his back to Mort's vantage point, he began taking aim at the bodies moving down the street. The loud report of the man's rifle echoed through the streets. He might as well have been spitting spitballs at a mannequin for all the difference it made. In the darkness, he couldn't see exactly where the man was hitting them, but he watched just the same. Then, to his elation, one of the burning shapes went down, and didn't move again.

Mort pulled his head back in the window and smiled to himself. "So they can be killed."

He stumbled around in the darkness of the restaurant, bumping into clunky wooden tables. He swept the place settings onto the floor with his arm, and tipped a table over on its side. He pushed it across the wood floor and set it in front of the broken window he had crawled into. It wasn't much for the moment, but it should give him some sort of warning if one of those things tried to crawl inside, and he simply couldn't do anything else with his knee in the condition that it was in.

Car alarms blared and the occasional sound of rifle fire masked all the noise that he made. He was tempted to turn on a light, but he didn't know if the light would draw those things to the house. Rather than risk it, he felt his way around the dining room, and then made his way into the kitchen. Cold metal counters and the smell of used cooking oil assaulted his nose. He would give anything for a flashlight, but there was none to be had, at least not that his eyes could distinguish in the dark.

He felt around the kitchen until he discovered what he thought was a stand-up freezer, visions of dead creatures in the darkness danced though his head. He pulled it open. The light from the inside lit up the kitchen enough for him to see. The kitchen appeared to be clear, so he tucked the gun into the back of his pants. The barrel was cold against his skin.

By the light of the freezer, he pulled up the left leg of his pants and examined his knee. The swelling was awful. His knee looked like it belonged more to an elephant than an out-of-shape homeless man. Mort lowered himself to the ground, his leg stretched out before him. He reached into the freezer and pulled out a pork chop, placing it on his knee. He sucked in a breath as the frozen meat touched his skin.

He closed his eyes and sat there. Enjoying the brief respite. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a cigarette. It was his last one, who knew for how long. He lit the cigarette, took a deep breath, and blew the smoke into the air.

He imagined that he was on a train, headed to wherever, hiding in a train car, ready to jump off at a moment's notice. Maybe he would go to the country. Maybe he could find a way down South, take a look at the old family homestead. He doubted it was still standing. It had been little more than a tin shack when he had left it.

It was all just a pipe dream anyway. He took a drag off of his cigarette and then ashed on the floor. He wasn't in the mood for etiquette at the moment. As he exhaled, he heard a noise upstairs. It sounded like the scraping of furniture on wood, but he couldn't be sure. He put the pork chop he had been icing his knee with back in the freezer and closed the door. He sat there, listening for any further noise as his eyes adjusted to the dark, then he rose to his feet, pulling on the counter to get himself up. Now that he had rested, he was calming down and the adrenaline was leaving his body. He realized just how sore and tired he had become. He didn't know how much longer he could go on for. All he wanted to do was sleep, but first, he had to check out the noise.

He walked into the dining room, and checked the table just to be sure. It was still there, ready to be knocked over at the slightest disturbance. In the darkness, he found a door that opened onto a steep staircase that led upstairs. He pulled his purloined revolver from his pants and took a deep breath.

His climb up the stairs was slow and arduous. The house was old, and the stairs squeaked with every step. When he reached the top of the stairs, he stood there shrouded in silence, clutching the pistol.

"Hello? Is anybody there?"

From somewhere in the house, he heard footsteps coming towards him, shuffling steps, uneven. He couldn't tell what direction they were coming from. It was too dark to see who or what was approaching him. His left hand instinctively searched the wall for a light switch, while his right hand shook with the pistol in it.

"Stop where you are."

The footsteps continued, shuffling across the wooden floor.

"I have a gun. I don't want to hurt you."

The fingers of his left hand touched on a switch, and he flipped it up just as an elderly black woman reached for his throat. He had time to see vomit dribble from her mouth before they both tumbled down the stairs.

Somewhere in the tumble, the gun went off. Blood dripped onto him as he fended off the woman's bites. She was straddling him, and it was only a matter of time before he was bitten. He fumbled around on the ground for the pistol, but he couldn't find it. With his left arm locked at a ninety degree angle, he pushed the woman back as far as he could, which wasn't far enough as far as he was concerned. Vomit dripped from her mouth onto his face, and her cold weight sent fear through his body.

The fingertips of his free arm brushed against the metal of the pistol. It was just out of his reach. He pushed the woman backwards and sat up, straining abdominal muscles that hadn't been used in years. Holding the woman at arm's length, he finally managed to grasp the butt of the gun. In one smooth motion, he brought it up under her chin and pulled the trigger. The flash temporarily blinded him in the darkness.

The struggling stopped, and Mort let out a scream of rage as the woman's body tumbled to the side, limp and very dead. He gestured at the woman's corpse with the gun, searching for something, anything to say. But mostly he was just a raw pile of emotions and fear. He heard the table in the dining room falling over, as one of those things attempted to climb inside. He turned and fired blindly at the window.

The light from upstairs barely reached where he was, so he couldn't see anything, but he heard a large thump as someone or something slithered in the broken window and landed on the floor. That was enough for him. Mort backed up the stairs; his entire body seemed composed of aches and wounds. He heard a couple more thumps, and then he heard the telltale sound of shuffling feet, a sound he was coming to despise. When he reached the landing, he examined the hallway.

There were multiple doorways, but he chose one at random. He closed the door lightly. He was in luck; the door he had chosen was to the bathroom, and it had a lock on it. He stepped into the bathroom, closed the door, and turned the lock. At least he was trapped in a place that had water. Mort wondered if he would turn into one of those things if he died from thirst.

It wasn't long until there was banging at the door. It was uncanny how they seemed to find him everywhere he went. Mort lowered himself onto the ground, and peered through the crack between the floor and the door. He could see a pair of shoes standing in the hallway. Behind that pair of shoes he could see a corpse climbing up the last few stairs in the stairwell. The sun couldn't rise soon enough.

Chapter 38: Hey, Neighbor

The police weren't coming. Of that he was sure. He could see the beginnings of sunrise out the window. He had thought about running to the fire escape, but he was frozen in place in the hopes that the cops would come. They were still banging on the door, and Rudy had no idea what he was going to do.

He was glad he lived in an apartment complex with thick doors. He was even more glad that he had several deadbolts. Rudy's stomach growled at him. It wasn't a sound he was used to hearing; he usually did an excellent job of keeping his stomach full. Part of him wanted to just run into the kitchen, pop a Hot Pocket in the microwave and eat his last meal, but the other part of him thought that the added noise would just keep the freaks outside banging on his door for even longer. They would have to get tired sooner or later? Right?

Rudy rose from the ground, his legs quaking under his bulk. He walked over to the window that looked out on the fire escape. The first touches of pink lit the horizon to the east, and he could see people moving in the street. It wasn't normal movement however. There were people running, and here and there he could see forms stumbling right down the middle of the street. The people weren't walking on the sidewalk, and he had seen that shambling gait before.

Things were bad, and for the first time in Rudy's life, he knew that he was going to have to get himself out of this jam on his own. No one was going to help him. With a groan, he unlatched his window and lifted it up. His breathing was labored, and he swore to himself when he looked over the ledge that led to the fire escape. His head spun, and he cursed himself for ever agreeing to live on the third floor of an apartment complex.

Rudy threw one of his legs over the edge of the windowsill. The banging at the door continued. His head spun as he looked down at the street. He couldn't do it. Just as he was about to pull his leg back inside, he heard the sound of splintering wood. The banging at the door became even more intense, and there was no turning back.

He pulled his other leg over the railing and put all of his weight on it. He yelped as the fire escape shifted under his weight. He could see the bolts rattling ever so slightly in the holes that had once been drilled in red brick decades ago. At any moment, the fire escape could give way, but given the choice of being eaten alive or plummeting to his death, Rudy would just as soon tumble to the rain-soaked pavement.

Rudy inched down the stairs of the fire escape, grasping the iron rails as he went. Wherever his hand touched the rails, the white paint flaked off to reveal rusted iron surfaces. The sun emerged over the top of the tall apartment buildings, and he was bathed in an orange glow. From up above, he heard the door to his apartment burst open. He had reached the landing to the next apartment, and he peeked inside.

The lights were off, and the reflection of the sun prevented him from seeing anything other than his own freckled face. Without warning, the window was thrown up, and a hand pulled him inside. He fell without grace, sprawled on the ground and in pain despite all of his unintentional padding. A soft hand was placed over his face, and as he lay there, muffling his groans of pain. He realized that he had been saved by the most beautiful woman that he had ever seen.

"Shut up," she said.

He was too shocked to make any noise. She left him wordless on the ground, as she ran to the window and slammed it shut. That’s when they heard them, the two monsters that had been banging on his door all night. They clumsily clambered onto the fire escape, their footfalls echoing throughout the not-so-quiet morning. There was a loud screech of metal, and then the fire escape tumbled away from the building, bits of eroded brick dust glittering in the sunlight.

Rudy and his savior rushed to the window. With a grace that matched her beauty, she threw up the window, and they both looked over the edge.  In the street, the fire escape sprawled out on the pavement, looking like nothing more than a white-ribbed worm, a giant DNA model that had fallen to the ground. Amid the twisted metal, his pursuers wiggled and squirmed, their appendages broken in numerous spots. He shuddered to think what he would look like if he had been on the fire escape when the two had emerged from his apartment.

He pulled his head back in the window, and that’s when he noticed that the most beautiful woman he had ever seen had a gun pointed at him.

“You can leave now.”

Rudy’s experience with talking to women was confined to arguing with his own foster mothers and giving female professors a hard time. He wanted to talk to this woman; he wanted to get to know her. But it was going to be hard to do that with a gun pointed at his head.

“I have nowhere to go,” he whined.

“Not my problem,” she shot back. Clearly she had a heart, or else she wouldn’t have saved him, but it was also apparent that she was scared out of her mind.

“Listen, I can’t go back to my apartment. The door is broken down. If I get trapped in there, there’s no way to escape.” Her only reply was to cock the gun.

He put his hands up and backed away as a reply. “Can I at least know your name?”

Rudy didn’t think she was going to say anything, but then she cocked her head, as if to “Say what could it hurt?” With a voice like sweet apple pie she said, “My name is Chloe.”

Rudy smiled his best disarming smile and said “My name is Rudy, Rudy Lincoln.”

“Nice to meet you Rudy. Now get the hell out of my apartment.” She gestured at the door with her gun.

He turned to go. Undoing the chain and throwing the deadbolts open, he pulled the door open and stepped into the hallway of the apartment complex. As he shut the door behind him, her heard Chloe’s sweet voice say, “Stay safe, Rudy.”

When he shut the door, he heard the chain rattle against the door and the deadbolts slide home. He wanted to be inside that apartment with Chloe. He wanted to protect her, or be protected; he didn’t quite know which.

With his head sunk between his shoulders, he moped up to his apartment. The door hung on one brass hinge. The wood of the doorjamb was broken. He tried to close the door, but the wood was damaged beyond repair.

Rudy sat in his La-Z-Boy, and watched the sun rise. He opened his last Mountain Dew Code Red and turned on his Xbox.

“Well, I might as well get in a few more games before the end of the world.”

Chapter 39: As Day Breaks

As the day broke across the city, and even across the country, thousands of scenes of horror like the following played out, tragic deaths of those that had no idea that something was going on, something apocalyptic.

****

Nina Gonzalez-Santiago slept with earplugs in. That’s what you had to do when you lived in an apartment complex where ranchero music blasted until three in the morning. It’s not that her neighbors were rude. It was just normal. Your cousin got married? Time to drink until 3 in the morning, singing songs drunkenly with all your family members. Your daughter turned fifteen? Time to have a quinceañera, and then drink until 3 in the morning, singing drunken songs with your family members. Hey! Someone had a baby! You know what that means… drinking until 3 in the morning… singing loudly… while loud ranchero music makes the walls shake.

Nina had learned long ago, from her own family’s experiences, that one does not simply go over to the apartment of someone who has been drinking for the whole day and ask them to turn the music down. That’s not how it works. Even if they did turn it down, they would likely only do so until you had climbed the stairs back to your own apartment and crawled in bed. Then it would come on, most likely louder than it was before. That’s how her dad had always done it.

So it was with earplugs that Nina slumbered at night. She could still feel the bass from time to time, but feeling bass wasn’t nearly as irritating as actually having to listen to it. When Nina raised her head off the pillow that morning to greet the sunshine, she had slept through the gunfire, the explosions, and the screaming. As far as Nina knew, today was just a regular day.

She wasn’t looking forward to going to her secretary job, but it wasn’t the worst thing in the world. She yawned as she padded barefoot through her apartment, showering, and putting her clothes on. She brewed herself a cup of coffee, threw it in a cup to go, and walked down the flight of stairs to her car. She marveled at the amount of garbage on the landing. Spare bottles littered the stairs, a garbage bag sat ripped and ownerless at the top of the landing, and what was that? Bullet casings? Once again, Nina thanked the lord for whoever had invented earplugs.

The windshield of her car was still wet from the night’s rain. She unlocked the door, swung it open, and tossed her briefcase in the passenger seat. Nina started the engine of her Toyota Prius, unaware that the engine, which was considered quiet for a car, was more than enough to bring the dead out of the woodwork.

From a third-floor landing, a body tumbled through the sky to land on her windshield, shattering it. Nina flinched and screamed. As she extricated herself from the Prius, she kept expecting people to run and help her. That’s how it worked in the movies. A woman screamed, and then everyone scrambled to help her. Only this time, no one came to her aid.

Instead, she watched in horror as the man who had shattered her windshield reached out to her with a gray arm. His face was shattered and misshapen, but the man could still see her for what she was. Food.

From other places, she could finally see help in the form of her neighbors… only they weren’t her neighbors, not anymore. There was the patriarch of the noisy family downstairs. His button-up western t-shirt was torn at the abdomen, and blood caked his brown skin. His face was blank and expressionless. But the most revolting sight was when Nina saw two of the man’s five children come stumbling out of the apartment doorway in much the same shape.

Nina screamed nonstop, unable to comprehend what was happening. Her first instinct was to get away, so that’s exactly what she did. Her voice cracking with every scream, she hopped back into her car and threw it in reverse. She could see out the back windshield, but driving in reverse was not one of her strengths.

The man who had landed on her windshield began tearing through the broken glass, his hands and arms shredding in the process. With her head turned, she didn’t notice him get his pale arm through the windshield until he had a handful of her hair. Despite the three story fall, the man still had quite a bit of strength, and he wrenched Nina's head to the side, causing her to back into a large oak tree on the side of the road. Her head banged against the headrest of her car, and the deployment of her airbag broke the gray man's arm in half. She would have been safe if it weren't for the handful of monsters that were advancing on her unconscious form. The first bite woke her. The second, third, and fourth made her wish she were dead. The fifth granted her wish.

****

Gianni Grimaldi had it all. The car, the acting career, the house on the hill. The only thing he didn't have was much time. He was late for the first day of shooting Marked for Vengeance, a medium-range-budget horror flick with theatrical aspirations. It was one of his first starring gigs, and he was kicking himself for going out the night before. But what are you going to do? It's your first night in a new town, you and your acting buddies are stuck in a hotel with nothing to do, and you've got money and a modicum of fame waiting to spread the locals' legs if you play your cards right. Of course, he was going to go out on the town.

He wondered if Spindly Jackson, ex-futbol star turned actor, felt the same way he did this morning. His head ached, and he wondered if makeup was going to be able to do anything about the bags underneath his eyes. With his hair gelled up just right, he stumbled down to the lobby of the Hotel Plush and set out on a quest for some coffee. It was 6:30 in the morning, and no one was around, not even the desk clerk was at their station.

On a metal cart, he spied two coffee containers next to a stack of Styrofoam cups. Ah, just what the doctor ordered. There was nothing like a good dose of caffeine in the morning to kick-start the old liver into functionality.

The sunlight streaming in through the front doors made his eyes hurt, so he turned his back to them. Gianni grabbed a cup, filled it with coffee, and then added a teaspoon of sugar. With his back to the lobby, he didn't notice the bellhop shambling towards him, his eye missing from its socket and the left sleeve torn off of his once pristine bellhop uniform.

The bellhop grabbed him from behind and took a bite out of Gianni's neck. They tumbled to the ground, and the last coherent thought that Gianni Grimaldi ever formed was, Not the face! The world would weep at his death... or at least the twenty or thirty movie reviewers who had appreciated him in bit roles.

****

Anan Abdullahi woke up in the morning to find that her mother was not there. This was normal. Her mother frequently stayed out all night, especially when she had a new boyfriend, which seemed to happen once or twice a month.

Anan lay in bed, wishing to close her eyes and fall back asleep, but it wasn’t meant to be. She could hear her little sister up to something in the other room. When her own stomach gurgled, she decided to get up and see if Emanna could use some food as well.

She stumbled out into the living room, across the stained, toy-littered carpet, and found Emanna jumping up and down on the couch, not wearing a stitch of clothing except for a dirty diaper. Anan’s morning was already starting out shitty.

She pulled Emanna into the bathroom and helped her get into a new diaper, she threw the old, stinky one into the garbage. They were down to their last diaper. She hoped that Mom brought home more or else Emanna would be walking around pooping wherever she went. She would probably get blamed, and then she would get the closet. She didn't want the closet. It was dark in there.

Hand in hand, Anan and Emanna walked into the kitchen to make themselves some breakfast. The kitchen looked just like it usually did. The sink was piled high with unwashed dishes, flies buzzed around the mess, laying clutches of tiny eggs in the week-old, rotten milk left in the bottom of a cereal bowl. Old fruit went to rot in a fruit dish on top of the microwave. It was all normal, and Anan and Emanna paid it no mind.

Emanna walked to the table, her toddler body desiring to sit in a big people chair instead of her highchair, while Anan walked to the fridge and looked inside. Old lunch meat, a few cheese slices, and no milk… it was the absence of milk that really depressed her. She slammed the door closed, and pulled a couple of bowls from the cupboards. They were the last clean ones. She eyed the sink suspiciously, staring at the tower of dirty dishes. Someone would have to clean them, but she decided that thought could wait.

Instead, she climbed up on the one clean spot on the counter, the one spot where beer bottles and old juice spills had not destroyed the tacky laminated surface. She opened the cupboard and pulled down a box of cereal, a giant blue box of Rice Krispies, three freakish elves smiling back at her, giant spoons dipping into the bowl on the box.

She dumped the cereal into a bowl, not caring about the stray Krispie or two that bounced off the counter and onto the floor. Then it was time to do it… time to put the water on. Anan hated the taste of water and Rice Krispies, but her options were limited. It was either a bowl of Rice Krispies with water, or pieces of questionable lunch meat or rotten fruit.

“Where is mom?” Anan asked plaintively as she set the bowl of Rice Krispies in front of Emanna, along with a spoon that seemed relatively clean. Emanna looked at her with questioning eyes; she had not yet started to speak. Anan didn’t know if that was normal or not, but she was beginning to suspect that it wasn’t. “Don’t worry; I’m sure she’ll be here soon,” she told Emanna more to reassure herself than Emanna.

Anan poured herself her own bowl of cereal and plopped down at the kitchen table. The first spoonful wasn’t so bad. The cereal was still crunchy, but she wished that they still had sugar. Rice Krispies were always better with sugar, but as with most things, they had run out weeks ago. Emanna was done with her bowl, so she hopped off of the chair and tossed the bowl in the sink, adding to the festering pile of dirty dishes.

Anan looked at the pile with dread in her eyes. So many dishes. She finished the last bite of her cereal, and walked over to the sink. Hesitantly, she began pulling the dishes out of the sink, trying to avoid getting her hands wet or getting any of the really nasty moldy bits on her fingers. She dry-heaved throughout the process.

In the other room, she could hear Emmana turning on the TV. They only received a few channels, and it didn’t sound like anything that Anan wanted to watch, so she resigned herself to finishing the dishes.

After she had cleared out the sink, she looked at the bottom of it. Mold and old food were plastered to the bottom of the sink, and with disgust in her chest, she picked up the old lump of steel wool that would do the scraping and cleaning. She leaned over the edge of the sink, grinding away with the steel wool, her shirt getting wet in the process.

Her mind wandered as she scrubbed, thinking of better times and better places. She remembered her father, his brown skin and the way he would always smile with his missing teeth. She missed him. Anan spent most of her daydreaming minutes fantasizing about her dad walking through the door. She would run to him, leap into the air, and he would catch her in one smooth motion and hug her tight in his arms. But she knew that wasn’t going to happen. She knew that people just didn’t come back from being dead, and if they did, well, it wouldn’t be anything that she would want to hug.

She shook the water off of the bowl that she had just cleaned and placed it on the counter to drip dry. She grabbed an old pot, covered in radioactive orange filth. What was this? Oh yeah, her mom had made macaroni and cheese last week. It was good… but this was just nasty. The parts of the pot where water had been sitting were covered in soggy and cold orange muck.

Anan turned the water on to get it as hot as possible, but still the stubborn soggy bits wouldn’t separate from the sides of the pot. It was time for more steel wool. She held the semi-rusty blob up to the window; bits of food and filth dangled from the swoops and loops that composed the soggy bundle. She tried not to look at it too hard, and she began scrubbing the pot.

Her mom had never told her what had happened to her dad. When she had asked her about it, her mom had seemed sad and almost embarrassed, then she had told Anan to never speak of it again. One night, when she was supposed to be sleeping in her room, Anan had snuck into the hallway to listen to her mom and her new boyfriend talk. She heard her mom sobbing. She had been talking about Anan’s father, and she overheard the word "overdosed," but her 7-year-old mind had no idea what that meant. The man with his arms around his mother held up an object to her mother’s lips, ran his hand through her hair, and told her that everything was going to be ok. Then he pulled out a lighter, held it to the object, and Anan watched from around the corner as her mother blew smoke into the air, acrid, stinging smoke. Anan didn’t like the smell of it, so she went back to her bed, wondering what the word “overdose” meant.

From the other room, Anan heard Emanna yell, “Mama!” Anan dropped the steel wool in the sink, and she ran to the living room with a smile plastered to her face. Emanna had finally spoken her first word! She skidded to a stop in the living room as her mother stood in the doorway of her bedroom, her shirt off and vomit running down her bare chest. Her eyes were swollen and puffy. A needle hung from her arm, and her black hair hung down over her face, tangled and speckled with more bits of vomit.

Emanna didn’t know better, so she ran to hug her mother. Anan did the same. Anan never had to wash another dish again.

Chapter 40: On the Road

Dustin's studio apartment wasn't much to look at. It was good enough for him. The rent was cheap, it was fine for a one-night fling, and he was on the top floor, so he didn't have to hear his neighbors for the most part. The one exception was the guy next door, a recovering alcoholic who spent more time drinking than recovering.

As he stepped from the apartment's cramped bathroom, he toweled himself off. Not even the scalding hot water of the shower could make him feel clean after everything he had seen that night.

The woman was asleep on his couch, which also served as his bed. She had said her name was Suzy before she curled up on his couch and drifted off to sleep. He didn't mind. It gave him a chance to freshen up and get his mind straight.

The random crack of gunfire in the morning also had a hand in helping him figure things out. After sliding on a clean, white T-shirt, Dustin padded across the living room to turn the TV on. He sat down in the apartment's only chair with the remote in his hand. What he saw only served to steel his resolve to get the hell out of town.

Things were bad all over. As the visions of violence danced across the screen, Dustin couldn't help but feel the nervousness build in his body. It started in his chest, and five minutes after he had first felt it, his body was trembling with tension. Just then Suzy woke up.

She sat up, her hair in a tangled mess, rubbing her eyes and yawning. Then she slowly laid back down on the couch and said, "I was hoping it was all just a dream."

Dustin didn't know what to say, so he just remained quiet.

"He was a nice guy, you know."

"Who?"

"My brother, the man in the car." Suzy looked off into the distance. Dustin tried to ascertain if she was merely sad or suffering from some sort of mental breakdown. "Pete was always a good guy. Last night, he called me up and said that he wasn't feeling so well. He had gotten into some sort of bar fight with a man. The man bit him, but he didn't think anything of it. I was taking him to the hospital when we got into the accident."

Dustin watched as realization dawned on her face. "The other driver. Did they..."

He interrupted her with a negative shake of his head. She buried her face in his sofa/bed, and sobbed softly. Dustin began gathering his things, unable to comfort the woman. How do you comfort someone who had inadvertently killed someone when their brother had turned into a monster? Someone else might have the words for that, but not him.

"Listen. We have to go. The city is waking up. Things are bad."

Suzy, her head still buried in the couch, said, "How bad?"

Dustin took a deep breath. "It's not just happening here. It's happening all over. The best thing we can do is to get away from here, get away from people as much as we can."

Suzy didn't offer any argument, so he continued to pack some things into his lone suitcase. "Do you have any family here? Besides your brother?" He felt like an ass mentioning him so soon, so he stuffed an extra pair of socks into the suitcase angrily.

"No, my parents retired to Florida last year. I was going to move down there, but I finally got hired as a teacher here. We were planning to take a vacation this August, but well... I guess that's all just a pipedream now."

Dustin pulled open the bottom drawer of his dresser and pulled out a few T-shirts, mostly old, faded T-shirts with band names printed across them, most of them black. After plopping four of them in the suitcase, he threw in a couple pairs of jeans and some underwear. He would give anything for a gun, and he almost felt like an idiot for being so anti-gun for most of his adult life. This was the reason the 2nd Amendment existed. Instead, he walked over to the closet and pulled out an old aluminum bat with the words "Easton" emblazoned across the barrel in red lettering.

"Even if you had the money, they've shut down all air traffic to try and prevent the spread of whatever this is. I heard it on the news." It was as if Suzy had just realized that there was a TV on in the room. She finally pulled her head out of the couch long enough to watch. Then she slowly sat up, sucked into the vortex of carnage that careened across the screen.

Dustin closed his suitcase and rested the baseball bat on top of it. Then he walked to the kitchen and began stuffing canned goods into paper bags. He was never so happy that he always had a pantry stocked with soup. It wasn't a lot, but it was enough to keep them from starving for a couple of weeks.

He walked out of his tiny kitchen and into the main room of his studio apartment to find Suzy staring at the TV, her mouth wide open and panic etched on her face. He placed the bags of food on the ground next to his suitcase and then walked over to Suzy. He placed his hands on her upper arms, and stared her directly in the face to make sure he had her attention.

"We have to go. We have to get out of the city."

Suzy shook her head in disbelief. "We can't go out there. People are dying. We'll be murdered."

Dustin shook his head and tried to speak as clearly as he could. "We have to leave. If we wait here, there will be more of those things. It's going to get a hell of a lot worse before it gets better. If we sit here and wait, we may not make it out alive. I'm going. With or without you. I've got an old car, not much to look at, but it runs just fine. I'm ready to go. You can stay here or you can come with me, but you've got to make up your mind. Make it up right now. If we stick together, there's a chance. If you want to stay here, you're welcome to it, but in 30 seconds, I'm walking right out that door and you're on your own."

She sat there thinking about it. Dustin wanted to slap her across the face to make her see reason, but that's not the type of guy he was. When it had been well over thirty seconds and she still hadn't said anything, he walked over to the floor, and picked up his baseball bat in one hand and his suitcase in the other. She just sat there. He'd just have to make another trip to get the food.

His front door opened out onto the second floor of a courtyard. He looked left and then right, not trusting the quiet of his general vicinity. He bounded down the rickety iron staircase, in a hurry to be done and away before the highways became clogged. He walked briskly, looking all about him, the hair on the back of his neck standing up. He had a white-knuckle grip on his baseball bat.

He approached the back of his primer gray Volkswagen Beetle knockoff. Made in Mexico, the car was an aging antiquity that suited his sensibilities just fine. Living in the city, Dustin had never had much use for it. The most he ever did with the car was hop inside, start up the engine and take it around the block for a few minutes. It was slow to get going, but it ran like a gem once it got the kinks out.

He lifted the hood of the Beetle and then crammed his suitcase in as tight as he could. The hood would close, but the food was going to have to be crammed in the back.

A noise startled him into action. He slammed the hood of his car, and hefted his bat, ready to defend himself. It was just Suzy, standing there with a bag of food in her arms. Dustin smiled and let the bat fall to his side, "You scared the shit out of me."

Suzy looked almost embarrassed, "I'm sorry."

"Don't worry about it. I'm glad you're coming. I didn't really want to do this all alone." Dustin opened the car for her, and she dumped the bag of groceries inside. Together, they walked back to his apartment and grabbed the last bag of groceries. They sat in the seat of the car as the day brightened. He put the key in the ignition, turned it, and began to feel nervous as he couldn't get the engine to turn over.

He was on his third try when Suzy screamed and pointed down the street; two people were walking towards the car, their shambling steps and blood-spattered clothing ominous in the light of the day. He turned the key again, and this time the engine caught. Dustin pulled away from the curb, fumbling with the stick shift, as it had been a while since he had last taken the car out for a spin.

The windshield was dirty and the morning glare made it hard to see. He slowly maneuvered the car through the growing crowd of creatures at the end of the street. Suzy jumped as one of them struck at her window, shattering the window and covering Suzy in jagged bits of glass. Dustin accelerated.

Once on the road, the going was a little easier, but it was clear that the city was fast becoming a shell of its former self. Random bodies littered the street, and dozens of those things were wandering about. The noise of his car drew their eyes and their footsteps.

There were other cars on the road as well, seemingly just as dangerous as the creatures that filled the streets. He swerved to avoid a speeding sports car only to sideswipe one of the dead. Suzy screamed at the impact. Despite the fact that he was pretty sure the woman had a broken leg, she still got up, and followed after them, limping and stumbling in his rearview mirror. He hoped she never caught up.

It was only a mile to the freeway on-ramp, but in that mile, they saw all they needed to see to know that they were making the right decision. As Dustin hit the freeway on-ramp, he accelerated around a corner, only to slam on his breaks at the last second. He skidded to a stop, inches from the car in front of him.

The traffic was backed up for miles. Cars were honking, people were waving their arms out windows, and in general, it seemed like a giant disaster waiting to happen. Dustin was about to throw it in reverse when two other cars pulled up behind him, trapping him on the on-ramp. In the distance, he could see greasy smoke rising to the sky. There were no lights; no fire trucks weaving through the traffic to put out the fire.

Dustin got out of the car to ascertain the situation, ignoring the protest of Suzy. He couldn't see much, but no one seemed to be moving. On a whim, Dustin looked behind them, and saw a horde of people heading toward them on foot. They stumbled and shambled but in the few seconds he took to watch them, they were a few feet closer, and he knew that was close enough.

He got back in the car, rolled down his window and adjusted his side mirror. He could see the heads of the crowd cresting the visible horizon. Dustin threw the car in gear and said, "Hold on."

Suzy screamed some more, and Dustin cranked the wheel to the right, pulling into the emergency lane. He gunned the engine, and the car jerked to life, racing up the emergency lane. He could feel the evil stares of the people that he was passing, but if it kept him away from the people that were behind him, he could tolerate a few dirty glances.

He had gone about twenty car lengths when a semi-truck veered into the emergency lane, halting his progress. He skidded to a stop. By now, more cars had followed his course of action, and there was nowhere to go. He was trapped between a concrete divider, a semi-truck that had no interest in getting out of his way, and a line of cars that had all followed him up the emergency lane.

Seeing no other option, Dustin turned the car off and exited the vehicle. More screams from Suzy. He was deaf to them, just as he would be to everything if he didn't get them moving. He ran up to the semi-truck on the left side amid honking and cursing from the cars behind him. He waved his hand at them as if to say he was sorry, which he was.

He reached the cab of the semi-truck, a gaudy yellow thing with a smiling lady in lingerie emblazoned on the side. He hoisted himself up on the step to see inside the window. He was greeted with the sight of two barrels of sawed-off death. Immediately, he threw one hand up, while the other grasped on the handle on the side of the truck. Seeing as how he hadn't had his head blown off yet, he decided to push his luck.

"Can you roll down your window?" he yelled.

The driver was hesitant, but against his better judgment, he lowered his window. "What do you want?" he asked gruffly.

"I was just wondering if you could move this truck so we can get out of here. We've got some visitors back there." He pointed back in the direction they had come. The driver moved quickly despite his bulk. He threw upon the door that Dustin was clinging to, sending him tumbling to the ground.

"Where?" he asked. The driver stood in his doorway, his hand to his forehead to shield his eyes from the morning sun. Dustin was about to point out the throng, when the driver's mouth dropped open. "Jesus H. Christ. Is that them?"

"Them?" he said confused.

"The fucking monsters. Is that them?"

"Yeah. I guess that is them. Now can you move this truck or what?"

The driver looked down at him as if he were a piece of gum stuck to one of his tires. Without saying a word, he sat back in the driver's seat of his truck and slammed the door shut. The hiss of air brakes being released was the only warning that Dustin had before the truck blasted into gear, smashing into the sedan in front of him. In a few seconds, the truck was motoring down the emergency lane, taking off rearview mirrors and paint with each car it passed.

Finally, a stroke of common sense. Dustin ran back to his car, dodging another vehicle that was eager to follow the truck's example. He was too tired and nervous to even yell anything at the driver. When he got back into the car, Suzy was in tears. Dustin checked his rearview. He could see the horde approaching the first set of cars that were still stuck on the on-ramp... the ones who had decided to play by the rules. He watched as the first of the creatures shattered the glass of the car and pulled its occupants out screaming. He tried to start the car.

Only it didn't start. It just made a sick wheezing noise as he clamped down on the clutch and turned the key. The cars behind him were honking furiously.

"Start it! Start the car!" Suzy yelled.

"What do you think I'm trying to do?" he yelled back. He looked in the rearview mirror to see that the horde was coming closer. Some people were getting out of their cars, running up the street. He saw one woman with a baby in her arms fall to the ground. The people behind her didn't stop.

"Start the car!"

Dustin didn't bother to respond. On the fourth try, the car finally started up, and they lurched to a crawl as people were flooding around his car. Up ahead, he saw something he didn't want to see. Another crowd of humanity was fleeing in their direction, which could only mean there were more coming from up the highway.

"I have to get out of here!" Suzy yelled.

Dustin could only inch ahead a few car lengths before he had to stop completely. Up ahead, he saw the semi-truck stopped in its tracks, the driver hanging out the door and firing his shotgun at whoever came close, running or not. All hope of escape was blocked. Before he could formulate a plan, Suzy threw open her door and bolted from the car, screaming, "I'm not going to die here!"

Dustin threw the car into park and was about to get out to chase after Suzy when one of the creatures dove into the door that Suzy had left open.

With the little space left available to him, Dustin was able to get his baseball bat up between himself and the creature that was attacking him. Cold, clammy hands clawed at his face, and he screamed as one of the icy fingers gouged his eye. Behind him, he heard broken glass. Hopes of a brave stranger pulling him out of the car danced in his head for a brief second, until he felt another set of chilly hands wrap around his throat. His screaming stopped, and he couldn't breathe.

No matter how hard he wanted to scream, he couldn't. The vice grip hands kept him from doing so, even when the creature behind him bit off his ear. He could feel the blood running down the side of his head. He was blinded with pain, and he finally managed to let out a scream when the creature he was battling managed to hook his fingers into his eye socket and pull his eye out. There would be no escape.

Chapter 41: The New Katie

Katie pulled the door open. As fast as she could, while they were still trying to respond, she placed the gun to their heads and pulled the trigger. They dropped. The bangs were loud. By the fourth one, she could no longer hear them, and the front of the house was clear. More people were headed her way, but she no longer cared if they were alive, dead, or somewhere in between.

She flung the door to the bedroom closed and leaned with her back against it while she re-loaded her gun. It was hers now. By the simple act of pulling the trigger and splattering her family's brains on the floor of the old man's bedroom she had claimed it for eternity. Even if someone managed to pry the gun from her cold, dead fingers, it would always be hers. She smiled at the old man on the bed. Fred Walker would walk no more. In the end, the decision had been easy for him. The bite. It had to be the bite the radio said. He had wanted to die.

What was more difficult was her own decision. With a family dead, and more than a handful murdered by herself alone, she really had no reason to go on. But she did. She wasn't acting on instinct; she was conscious of her decision.

Her first stop would be back home, if there was a home to go to. But first, she had to make it there. She pulled the door open to find another one walking through the front door. She looked very familiar, although her hair was stringy and matted with dirt and part of her cheek was missing, exposing her teeth. The old her would have hesitated, perhaps even tried to talk some sense into the woman.

The new her pulled the trigger and barely winced at the booming echo as that somewhat familiar face turned into a mass of red flesh and bone fragments. She stepped over the recent addition to her corpse collection and made her way down the street.

The sun was up. It was a new day, and her nostrils were filled with gun smoke. She strolled down the street, her bare feet welcoming the cool morning asphalt. Though it seemed like she had run miles last night, she was actually only a block down the road from Fred Walker's now lifeless abode.

There were people in the streets, but whether they were living or not, she didn't care. As long as they didn't get in her goddamn way, they could stumble about all they wanted to. Katie calmly walked to her house. She stopped in the front yard to examine the burnt cop car from a distance. There was no sign of the occupants of the car, so she decided to head into her house.

The knob turned easily in her hand, and she stepped inside, her gun at the ready. It was like a time machine. There they were on the wall, hung in a silver picture frame, his hand on her shoulder. She knocked the picture off the wall as she passed it. It crashed to the floor, the glass shattering. Katie stepped into the kitchen, admiring the items in the house as if she were some sort of archeologist that had stumbled upon the perfectly preserved residence of some ancient civilization.

Katie leaned against the kitchen counter. "Why the fuck am I here?"

If this were a normal school day, she would be putting together lunches. Peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, sliced apples, and some cheese-flavored goldfish crackers, just what a growing boy and a loving husband needed to make it through the day. What a pile of shit that life had been. Truth be told, she had hated it. But she was locked into it, the mortgage, the responsibility of bringing a child into the world, the weight of wedding vows... she could have walked away from it all years ago, if it weren't for the loneliness.

She cared about them, but it was so much easier to just be on your own. Somewhere deep down inside, she felt guilty, as if the fact that she had secretly wished for this scenario, albeit without the resurrecting dead bit, had caused it to come true. Now she was in a kitchen that belonged to no one. All its owners were dead. She was standing on the precipice of her own future with nowhere to go but forward due to the fact that, behind her, her life lay in decaying ruins. She stood waiting, waiting for the future to come to her.

Katie walked upstairs, changed into some more suitable end-of-the-world clothing, and then she grabbed the keys off the hook by the door. She stuffed the revolver into her jacket pocket, and then walked into the dark garage. With her left hand, she turned on the lights. She walked to her car, unlocked it and sat inside. That deep down, sad part of her said that she should just sit there with the car running while the garage filled with carbon monoxide, binding to her red blood cells and preventing her body from absorbing and carrying oxygen. That would be too easy though.

She knew what her new purpose in life was. It was to find hell and burn in it.

Chapter 42: Friends and Murder

Zeke didn't get far before his conscience was biting at his heels. He stopped at the corner of the street, his hands on his knees, the sweat on his head cooling in the morning air. The soldier in him wanted to run, get back home, load up his guns and hump it out of town. He'd shoot first and ask questions later.

The retired part of him couldn't help but feel as if he was merely acting on instinct, like a robot. He thought about who he had been before he had enlisted. Some people had called him funny. Others had called him lover. Right now, Zeke called that person dead. If what he thought was going down was actually happening, and he went back to what he was in the army, well then it was like he had died at the hands of the whore already.

Zeke turned on his heel and ran back down the block, bursting through the police station's tall wooden doors. The scene was still horrifying, and for the first time in a long time, Zeke felt fear. He felt humanity at the back of his throat, ready to be released. He ran to the black man and began kicking furiously at the bar.

"C'mon, man. Hit that bar, or I'm leaving your ass here." The man looked at him, relief in his eyes. He redoubled his efforts, and Zeke kicked the bar as hard as he could.

Behind him, the three cops remaining in the station were wrestling with their own. It was only a matter of time before they pulled their weapons and put them down. Then they were all stuck here. That could mean escape, or it could mean death for every man chained to the bar. Overcorrection was always a possibility when it came to duty. If anybody knew that, it was Zeke.

The bar wriggled against the wall. The bolt securing his friend was now looser than ever, but it just wouldn't budge. Once again the black man sat down on his haunches, placed his feet against the wall and pulled with all his might. While he was doing this Zeke leapt up into the air and landed on the brass bar. It worked. The concrete cracked and the bolt came free, and none too soon, as the man next to his friend had finally lost his battle with the undead. Whole fingers stuck out of his attacker's mouth, blood dripping down the dead man's long gray beard.

The black man worked the silver handcuff feverishly down the bar, wrecking his wrist and drawing blood in the process. He pulled his hand free just as gunshots rang throughout the precinct lobby. Zeke and his new friend took off into the early morning sunlight, dripping blood and sweat. More shots rang out behind them, and they instinctively ducked, but the shots were coming from inside the building.

The streets were eerily empty for an early summer day, and Zeke knew that it was only a matter of time until they were confronted with another situation. They ducked into the stairwell of a parking garage and took cover among the cold concrete stairs. Zeke peeked his head over the railing from time to time to assess the situation and make sure that they weren't being followed. Meanwhile, his friend collapsed on the stairs taking deep ragged breaths.

"I thought you left me," he managed to get out between jerky huffs.

"I probably should have," he said as friendly as he could muster, which on a good day sounded like Beaver Cleaver's dad reading the Beav the riot act.

"My name's Louis, but everyone calls me Lou." He held out his hand. Zeke shook it gladly.

"I'm Zeke."

They sat there that way, breathing heavily in the shade of the parking garage. Gradually their breath became more normal, and exhaustion began to creep in.

"What do we do now? You think those cops are going to come after us?"

Zeke scrutinized the street down below. "No. They've got bigger fish to fry. I'm exhausted." Zeke plopped down on the concrete steps of the stairwell, despite the fact that it smelled like a homeless person's lavatory. "We're not going to last long on the street. You have a place we can go?"

Lou thought for a moment, and then said, "Yeah. I got some friends about a mile down the road. They got themselves a place, but I don't think it's the type of place you're looking for."

"What do you mean?"

"Let's just say these brothers aren't the most social dudes."

Zeke looked at the man, trying to figure out exactly what he meant. "What do you mean 'social'? Are they drug dealers? Pimps?"

Lou looked at his feet. "They're all that and more. You might want to think twice before going there. They're not too fond of white folk."

Zeke laughed. "At this point, the street is full of motherfuckers who ain't too fond of anyone, no matter their skin color. I'll take my chances."

"Amen to that."

Zeke stood up and helped Lou to his feet. Then he reached in his pocket for a cigarette. He held one out to Lou, who grabbed one out of the pack, and together they stood on the concrete steps, lost in thought and smoking. When they were done, they tossed the butts on the ground.

"Well, no time like the present to get a move on," Zeke said.

They walked quietly down the steps of the stairwell and entered the street. They walked in the shadows of the buildings. Despite the fact that it was morning, there were very few people out and about. The second intersection they reached provided a nice vantage point for Lou and Zeke. They looked down the street which rose to the west as it left the middle of town. Zeke pointed out a couple of burned out cars, and a knot of shambling bodies two blocks down.

Things didn't seem to be getting better. Despite this fact, the middle of downtown was probably one of the safest areas of the city. It was composed mostly of high-end businesses and office buildings. There were very few residences in that part of town, and most of those were locked up like Fort Knox with iron-barred doors only accessible by keycards.

They continued their trek. Zeke's hands itched for a weapon. His eyes darted around the street, scanning for potential threats and looking for anything that they could use as a weapon. There was nothing. Even the garbage can lids were chained up tight. At this point, he would settle for a wooden stick, but even that didn't present itself.

Another block down, amid the canyon of eerily quiet buildings, a car careened past them in the street. The driver ignored them as they flattened against a wall.

"You have a car?" Zeke asked Lou.

"No, but I wish I did. I'd get the hell out of this city right now."

"Yeah, well you and about five-hundred-thousand others probably had the same idea. If that fool gets on the highway, he isn't going nowhere."

The zooming of a passing car engine had livened up the street a bit. A few shambling people rounded the corner, walking away from Zeke and Lou in the direction of the car. They let them move down the street, and then followed at a slow and quiet pace.

In a whisper, Lou said, "Let's cut over a block, and see if we can go around those fools."

Zeke nodded his head. It sounded like as good a plan as any. They crept silently up the sidewalk. When they reached the corner, Zeke leaned around it to see what was ahead of them. The streets were definitely more populated. It seemed the closer they were getting to the center of the city, the more of them there were. Zeke's first instinct was to sit on the ground and die.

His second instinct was to get pissed. "Let me ask you something, Lou. Are these friends of yours worth reaching?"

Lou laughed quietly. "I wouldn't say they were worth reaching, but if you want more than just your dick in your hand, then yeah, they're worth it."

Zeke was tired of playing by the rules. He crossed the street motioning for Lou to follow him. In front of them was a restaurant, a fancy steakhouse from the look of it. It looked like a suit and tie affair, but none of that mattered now. The doors were shut tight when he tried them.

Still whispering, Zeke said, "We're probably not going to make it a mile without some sort of protection. I bet there's some shit in that restaurant that we can use. Knives, pipes, anything that'll keep those things at arm's length. The other side of town is a little more populated, and I'd rather be prepared than caught with my pants down."

"I agree, only there's a problem," said Lou.

"What?"

"We don't got no ties," Lou quipped.

"Alright, enough of the humor. When I bust open this window, we're going to have to be quick. A place like this probably has an alarm on it. Grab what you can, and get ready to fight because those things have a one track mind, and judging by how they reacted to that car, they seem to be drawn to sound."

"I got it. Why don't we just go through the door?"

Zeke laughed as he said, "The glass is too thick. We'd need a sledgehammer just to get through it.

Zeke took his shirt off and wrapped it around his fist. He drove it through one of the big glass windows, silently hoping to not cut an artery in the process. The noise was far louder than he wanted. The alarm started almost immediately. With his boot, he kicked out enough glass for himself to crawl inside the window. He crawled in, cutting his hand on an overlooked piece of glass jutting up out of the frame.

"Watch that glass," he said over his shoulder as Lou crawled in behind him. They made their way to the back of the restaurant. Zeke grabbed a spare towel off of a countertop and wound it around his injured hand. Then they made their way back into the kitchen.

They didn't have to search long before they found the cutlery hanging above a prep station. Zeke grabbed a shiny, stainless steel cleaver off of a hanging rack and he handed Lou the next biggest knife, a wicked butcher knife that wouldn't look out of place in Michael Myers' hands.

"Let's go," he said.

Lou followed him without questioning, which was a good sign as far as Zeke was concerned. All he did was say, "It's a shame we can't stay and cook a steak. I've never had the scratch to eat in a place like this."

"You can stay if you want to, but you're more likely to become dinner than to eat dinner."

"Fuck that," Lou said as Zeke pushed his way out the emergency door in the back of the restaurant. He could hear glass crunching underneath someone's feet as the door swung shut behind them. Those things might move slow, but they sure had a way of sneaking up on you.

Which is why he wasn't surprised when they were confronted by the one-armed corpse of a custodian on the other side of the door. The custodian snarled at him, his jumpsuit covered in old gore. That wasn't the disturbing part though. In the custodian's teeth, he saw bits of hairy flesh stuck between his two front teeth.

"Alright, Lou. Aim for the head. That seems to be the only way to drop one of these motherfuckers." Lou swung his knife sideways as the wayward janitor reached for him with his one remaining arm. The knife glanced off of the man's skull, filleting a nice flap of skin off the side of his head, but doing little else.

Zeke stepped in with a well-aimed chop to the back of the creature's skull. The cleaver stuck and the zombie stood there jittering about, but he was still alive.

"Use it like a spear, Lou. This ain't the damn movies. That thing isn't going to cut through bone like that."

Lou nodded in understanding and stabbed the knife through the custodian's eye. He fell to the ground and Zeke stepped on his head and pulled the cleaver free, wiping the blade on the cleanest part of the custodian, which took a while to find.

"Nice work," Zeke said, "now let's move our ass."

Lou was breathing heavily as they continued their cross-town jaunt. The piercing noise of the alarm from the steakhouse had drawn all sorts of the creatures from out of the woodwork.

"You up for a jog?" Lou asked.

"Well, I better damn well better be," Zeke replied.

They took off running at an easy pace. Weaving in and out of the dead people that had been drawn to the alarm. They managed that for some blocks, and then the years of smoking began to catch up to Zeke. His lungs burned with fire, and sweat poured down his face. His legs felt like rubber, and it was all he could do to keep putting one foot in front of the other. In gasping breaths, he managed to ask, "How much further?"

Judging by Lou's lengthy breathless reply, he was in much the same situation as Zeke, "Not much further. Only a couple more blocks."

They ran down the middle of the street now, which was ideal because it kept any random dead people from springing out at them from alcoves. The sun blasted down at them, the shadows disappearing from the street as it rose into the sky, bringing forth the heat that had disappeared with the night rains.

Down one alleyway they saw a man fighting ten or more of the things with only an umbrella in his hands. Neither of them slowed their rubber-legged jog. They came to the very center of town. Burnside was a wide street with two lanes of traffic heading east and west. The road was clogged with stalled cars, their doors open, and blood staining the pavement. Smoke curled into the sky from the east, and to the west he could see entire apartment buildings burning. Zeke's mouth dropped open as he saw a person jump from the top floor and plummet to the ground.

Lou grabbed him by the arm, and they weaved through the traffic jam of empty cars. The dead were everywhere, and the cars were only a minor inconvenience, as they sought to get their hands on Zeke and Lou. They made it to the other side of the street after cutting back and forth through the rows of cars to avoid the dead. It was if they were playing a real-life version of Pac-Man... only there were no power pellets, but Zeke hoped that would change when they got to the place Lou was talking about.

When they finally made it to the other side of the street, they sprinted down the sidewalk. Lou pulled him towards a squat brick building with three floors. The windows were boarded up, but judging by the squalid look of the building and the neighborhood, he wasn't sure that it was because of the situation.

They ran around the side of the building, dodging random monsters and their outstretched claws. The entire building was shaped like a letter C. A tall, wrought-iron gate blocked off the empty courtyard while a wing of apartments to the north and south rose above it, blocking out the sun. They scaled the fence, and landed with a thud on the other side.

Zeke finally took the moment to look at his hand. It was still gushing blood. Behind him, he could hear groaning and the banging of creatures on the gate.

"C'mon. Let's get inside," Louis said as he strode across the courtyard. The walls were littered with graffiti and empty cans of cheap beer and malt liquor. Cigarette butts covered the sidewalk. Lou walked up to the front door and tried to turn the handle. Nothing happened. "What the fuck?" he said as he tried again to the same result.

"Nobody home?" Zeke asked.

Lou stood back from the door and yelled up at a window above the door. "Gary Lee! Let me in! It's me, Satchmo!"

Lou pounded on the front door, and finally a man opened it, a man with a very mean looking submachine gun pointed right at them. He was big, black, and very muscular. His shirt could barely contain his arms, and his Jheri curl shone in the dim light of the entryway.

"What are you doing here? How do I know you're not one of them things?" the man asked, waving the machine gun around with an easy familiarity and a dash of irresponsibility. The man made Zeke nervous. There was something about him that seemed off.

"Gary Lee, it's me, man. Satchmo."

"Yeah, yeah. I know you, but who the hell is this guy?" Gary Lee said, waving his gun around some more.

Lou smiled and pointed at Zeke. "That's the man that helped me get away from the cops."

"You sure he isn't a cop?"

"I'm not a cop," Zeke said.

"Fuck you," said Gary Lee, "I wasn't talkin' to you. I'm talkin' to fuckin' Satchmo."

Lou moved to Gary Lee in an effort to calm him down, "He isn't a cop, man."

"You guys get bit?" Gary Lee asked, his guard slipping a little bit.

They both shook their heads, but that wasn't good enough for Gary Lee. He made them show him their arms and legs, and when he had seen everything he needed to see, he said, "Fuckin' motherfuckers. I ought to shoot your asses right now for bringin' them things here."

They looked behind them to see that ten of the creatures were now at the gates, their arms thrust through the wrought-iron bars, faces pressed against them.

"Come on in. Get your asses in here. You're drawing a fucking crowd already."

They entered the apartment building, and for a second, Zeke thought about turning right around. The inside was filled with pungent smoke, carpet that smelled like old urine and vomit, and every inch of wall was plastered with more graffiti. A life-size portrait of Gary Lee with four naked, big-titted women clinging to his legs while he brandished an AK-47 dominated the wall of the stairwell. They climbed the stairs, and emerged in a second-floor foyer which was filled with couches full of sleepy, passed out people. Gary Lee kicked one of them off the couch with his silver-tipped boot. The couch was duct-taped where the worn fabric had split apart. Gary Lee plopped onto the couch and pulled a joint from a shirt pocket.

He lit it and took a puff, as he began to question them about what they had seen. "So what's it like out there? We had to close up shop last night. One of the girls got herself a nasty case of dead standing on the corner last night."

Lou related his tale and told the story of how he had gotten picked up by the cops for assaulting one of those things. He told of their escape from the police station, and the harrowing adventure they had just trying to move a mile across town. At the end of the story, Gary Lee just took a puff off his joint, and said, "No shit." Then he got up and walked away.

Lou led him to a room with some dirty mattresses on the floor. Zeke was dead tired, so he fell on the mattress, despite its stains, and drifted off to sleep. It was a tortured sleep, piled high with screaming drill sergeants, both alive and dead, making his life a living hell. At the end of the dream, he was standing in the bottom of his hole in the sand when bodies began falling on him, burying him under their weight. He awoke screaming.

Zeke buried his face in his hands and then rubbed the sleep from his eyes. When he took his hands away, the dream began to fade from his mind and he noticed that Lou was watching him. "I'm alright. Just a bad dream."

Lou was smoking a cigarette while lying on his back on the dirty mattress. He looked up at the ceiling, as if he were daydreaming. He ashed on the ground, as apparently hundreds of people had before.

Zeke rose from the mattress and shook his head. He was sore, tired, and all he wanted to do was lie in the bed. But he knew that wasn’t prudent. The soldier inside of him commanded him to get up, check out his surroundings and see if he was completely safe. Zeke got to his feet and nudged Lou into action with his boot.

“C’mon. Let’s go check out the situation.”

With Lou by his side, they proceeded to walk through the building, stumbling upon sights both horrifying and concerning. In one room, people were smoking crack, about a dozen of them, glassy-eyed, unkempt, and unaware of their presence. For them, it seemed as if the world was turning just the same as it ever was. They simply poked their heads in the room and moved on. They could hear the sounds of sex behind a few of the closed doors; they moved on from those rooms as well.

“I’m not sure this is the safest place to be,” Zeke whispered to Lou.

“Yeah, I know. But it was the closest place.”

“Well, we ought to see about putting this place far behind us. I don’t like the things that are going down here, and it’s bound to end up badly. If those things get in here, there’s not a single person here capable of fighting besides ourselves,” Zeke said as they walked by an unconscious junkie lying in his own vomit, pants half-on and with no shirt.

“I agree, it’s not ideal, but all we have is a butcher knife and a meat cleaver. We’re not going to last long out there if we don’t upgrade.” They came to a stop at the landing. They peeked through the curtains and through the boards on the windows. It was still daylight outside, but you wouldn’t know it from inside. The courtyard was still empty, except for trash and graffiti. More of the creatures had gathered at the gate to the courtyard. The gate bowed inward, the weight of the people outside straining the gate to its limits. It was only a matter of time before it gave way completely, and then the flimsy wooden doors downstairs would be next.

“Well, we better make our move quick. Or we won’t be able to move at all.” Zeke turned to Lou and said, “How much do you care about these people… Satchmo?”

Lou looked around the landing at the flopped bodies, litter, grime, and sadness. “I don’t give two shits about these people. They’re dead already. When that fence goes; this place goes.”

“What about Gary Lee? You guys seem to have a history.” This part was important. How Lou answered would influence how he would proceed.

Lou nodded his head and said, “Me and Gary Lee go way back. He used to look out for me. But over the years, he became more about Gary Lee, more about the hustle. Truth be told, he was more likely to blast a hole in us than to let us in here. If he gots to go so we can go, then he gots to go.”

That’s what Zeke wanted to hear. Zeke had no illusions about what it would take to get out of here alive and move to a more advantageous position, preferably somewhere outside the city, with a thick wall and plenty of ammo.

“At the very least, we could use his gun, and any more he has lying around. If he won’t cooperate, then he’ll have to go.” It all made sense to Zeke. As he looked out the window one more time, he saw the fence give just a little more. “Let’s go find Gary Lee.”

Lou led the way through the trashed out halls and up some stairs, past tweaked out junkies and crack whores. They came to a room at the end of the north wing. A skull was painted on the door in blood.

“This is it,” Lou said, “Gary Lee’s room.”

“Let’s do this quick,” said Zeke. He reared back and with his right leg he kicked the flimsy door open, splintering the doorjamb. They rushed inside to find Gary Lee completely naked and in mid-thrust on a chained up woman. They grabbed Gary Lee and threw his naked body to the ground. Zeke held the butcher knife to Gary Lee’s throat. “Don’t move a muscle, or your headless body will be flapping around here like a chicken with its head cut off. You make a sound, and it’s your last.”

“Hey, man. Look,” Lou said, his hand pointed at the chained up woman.

Zeke turned his head to see the woman clearly for the first time. She wasn’t a woman; she was one of those things. Blood caked her backside, and her eyes were pale and lifeless. Zeke thought he was going to throw up, and he could see the same look on Lou’s face.

Zeke turned to Lou and said, “You’re sick. I ought to chop your head off right now.”

Gary Lee laughed, not fazed by the knife to his throat, “I always knew this day would come. I just didn’t know it would be at the hands of you, Satchmo. What are you doing running around with this cracker? Why are you doing this?”

Lou looked at Gary Lee and said, “You’re not the Gary Lee I grew up with. The Gary Lee I knew would be fighting, trying to help people. Instead, you’re up here, high as hell, and… I can’t even say it.”

Gary Lee laughed some more. “Go on. I’m not ashamed. She lets me do whatever I want to do. It takes a little while to get used to the cold, but it can be done. Go on give her a try yourself. I'd stay away from her mouth though.” Lou's laugh was a booming one, tinged with a slight hint of madness.

“Don’t listen to him, Lou. Find the goddamn guns and let’s get the hell out of here.”

Lou tossed the room, coming up with a submachine gun, a couple of pistols, and a few boxes of ammunition. Lou loaded the guns and they were ready. He took aim at Gary Lee and said, “Any last words?”

Gary Lee looked at Lou with defiance in his eyes, “You’re no son of mine.” With that, Lou pulled the trigger, sending Gary Lee’s brains splattering across the dirty white mattress.

Zeke sprung to his feet and grabbed the submachine gun from Lou. He had known all along, of course. The resemblance was too much to be a coincidence. Give Lou a Jheri Curl, and he would be the spitting image of Gary Lee, only twenty years younger and without the haggard junkie face.

“You good? You ready to move?”

Lou looked at Zeke and said, “Nah, man. I’m not good. But I can move.”

Just then, they heard what they had been fearing. With a shriek of twisted metal, the gate came down. Zeke pulled the curtain back and watched as 30 dead people shambled across the courtyard, breaking glass bottles and crushing cans with each footstep. There were more dead heading their way, drawn by the shriek of the gate or the gunshot. It didn't matter.

“What do we do now?” Lou asked.

Zeke squeezed a round into the naked lady's head and said, “We wait.”

Chapter 43: Til Death Do Us Part

Old Han fired his pistol without thinking as the youth slid through the broken window. His wife’s shrieking drove all feelings of romance away. As more people appeared at the window, he retreated to the back of the house, dragging Fang along with him.

“Bad things are happening,” Han said, “very bad things.”

Fang stopped screaming long enough to state the obvious, “You killed that child.”

Normally, he would have told her to shut her mouth, but it was important that she realized what was going on. “He was already dead. Look.” He pointed at the figure of the youth wearing a black Bruno Mars t-shirt. The youth stumbled down the hallway, blood seeping from the bullet hole on his shirt.

“I don’t understand,” Fang whimpered.

“Of course you don’t. What would you do without me?” Han took aim and the child fell to the ground, a hole in his forehead and his brains sliding down the living room wall. There were more behind him. Han dragged Fang into the bedroom and closed the door behind him.

He set the pistol on the bed as he began to drag the dresser to block off the door. Despite the fact that the dresser weighed twice as much as he did, he managed to get it in front of the door just as the pounding began.

He turned around to wipe the sweat off of his brow when he saw her standing there, the gun leveled at his face.

“What you doing?” Han demanded. He took a step towards her, and she yelled at him to stop, her finger on the trigger. “You crazy?”

“You’re the crazy one,” she yelled. “You always have been.”

“I’m only say once. Give me that gun.”

“Then what? Don’t you see? It’s here. The end of the world is here.” She smiled as if a grand idea had blossomed in her brain. “It’s here.”

She pulled the trigger, and Old Han fell backwards onto the floor. His hand went to his chest. Blood pumped out of it spraying across the room with every beat of his heart. Fang dropped the gun on the bed and knelt beside Han, cradling his head. He looked up at her with questioning eyes.

They said nothing. Fang held her man until he faded away, tears streaming down her face; the pounding at the door become deafening. His eyes closed one last time, and she knew he was safe, her devoted husband, safe from his own madness and perhaps even her own.

Fang had waited patiently for the end of the world, waited years in fact while that decrepit little ball of hate had slept silently next to her for decades. That cheapskate, heartless bastard refusing to die on his own, yet refusing to leave her at the same time. Pride is a strange thing, strange enough that it could make two people who loathed each other sleep in the same bed for year after year, neither one refusing to budge, refusing to give in and admit that somewhere along the way they had become wrong for each other.

Han’s inability to embrace the opportunity around him, to understand the new world that they were living in, had driven a wedge between them that set them growing in different directions for decades. Each day they woke up, they were further and further apart.

She had looked at him from the corner of her eye during breakfast, plotting against him for years. She could see the same looks from him every now and then, but as is always the case, the woman was always better at hiding her feelings, at being more circumspect.

Now it was done. Her new life awaited her just outside the door.  All she had to do was shoot her way past them and make it to somewhere safe. She stood up, gently setting Han’s head down on the floor.

She pulled an old piece of luggage from the closet, the same luggage she had used when they had come to America. She began putting her clothes in the luggage, cramming them into the suitcase with shaking hands, unconcerned with tidiness.

She was zipping up the suitcase when Han’s hand, still slightly warm, seized her ankle. He pulled her down to the ground and began clawing at her. He was small, but she had always been smaller.

Fang screamed as Han straddled her and bit into the flesh of her bicep. She punched and kicked, but nothing had any effect. The struggle lasted longer than one would have expected looking at the size of Fang, but in the end, the pounding on the door stopped, and Han and Fang were united forever as husband and wife, trapped in a squalid room in America, far from home.

Chapter 44: Swords and Flames

Rudy sat in his apartment, his busted door yawning open as the day brightened. His mind whirled with possibilities… or the lack thereof. He could see if he could find a car, maybe something with the keys still in the ignition. He could try and escape on foot. Despite the fact that he had never learned to drive and was woefully out of shape, either of these ideas would be better than sitting in an apartment with a busted door waiting for another dead person to wander in.

He grabbed the remains of his last bottle of Code Red off the counter and unscrewed the red cap. Sweet, sweet sugar flooded his gullet, and he wiped his brow as if he had just finished with a long day of work. He could have been filming a soft drink commercial.

A thought suddenly popped into his head as the caffeinated refreshment coursed its way through his body. His neighbor, the jerk-off British guy across the hall... he was dead. He seemed like the type that would have a weapon stashed away here and there. At the very least, he would probably have a butcher knife, which would be an upgrade over the dull, ancient steak knife that he had sitting in his lap.

Without hesitation, he walked across the hall and stood in front of his neighbor’s door. He tested the handle just to be sure, but it was locked. Rudy took a running start at the door and hit it as hard as he could. He bounced off, the only damage being to his pride.

From down the hall, he heard a giggle.

"Who's there?" he queried tremulously, rolling his body over so he could stand. There was no answer. Rudy looked down the hallway at the door at the end of the hall. A girl lived there, not as attractive as the girl downstairs, but he would count himself lucky if he could even talk to her. His face blushed as he stared at the darkness of the peephole in her door, imagining her there, her hand over her mouth, trying to stifle her laughter.

Rudy hoped he was just hearing things. He lowered his shoulder, pumped his thick legs, and charged into the door again. This time, he did a backflip as the surprisingly sturdy door rejected his ponderousness. This time there was more than giggling. There was outright laughter coming from behind the doorway at the end of the hall.

"Cut it out!" he yelled. "It isn't funny!" Spittle flew from his mouth as he knelt on the floor, his face flushed with blood and his eyes beginning to tear up. He knelt on one knee, trying not to burst into tears. The door at the end of the hallway opened, and he thought the floodgates were going to open with it, but he was able to maintain his fragile emotions as she appeared, laughing, with her hand over her mouth.

She was wearing black cargo pants and a red T-shirt with a grey long-sleeved shirt underneath. Her boots were clunky brown things, and they pounded on the floor of the apartment complex as she rushed to help him to his feet. Through their combined efforts of struggling and groaning, they were able to get him standing again.

"What are you doing?" she said between her smiling teeth.

Rudy was never very good at directly answering people's questions. He always had something smart to say, whether he wanted to say it or not. Maybe it was the shock of the night and its terrible events, but Rudy found himself answering sincerely for one of the few times in his life. "I'm afraid."

The woman stopped laughing and said, "I am too."

Rudy straightened out his bedraggled clothing as he continued, "I thought maybe this guy might have some sort of weapon in his apartment, so I was trying to kick the door down."

"Maybe we can do it together," she said.

For a second, Rudy thought she was talking about sex, and then he shook his head. Of course not, he thought. Who would have anything to do with him and his ginger bulk? "Yeah. Let's give it a try."

She counted to three, and they both charged at the door. It splintered off the hinges, and they both fell inward. She was the first to her feet, and again she helped him stand, her warm hands sending electricity up his arms and into his brain. He was still looking her in the eyes when he became aware of how awkward he had become. Then he noticed the surroundings.

The man's apartment looked like some sort of deranged torture chamber. Whips and chains hung from the walls, and the entire room had the smell of old, stale marijuana smoke. A huge, four-person bong shaped like a dragon with swooping wings sat on the living room table. The floor was covered in plastic, and the garish lighting turned the room into a sea of pastels and shadows. The windows were shuttered, and the room was eerily quiet.

"Oh, my God," she said. "Look at this place. It just goes to show you, you never know who your neighbors are until you break in and find a weird sex dungeon."

It seemed like Rudy would never stop blushing today. "Your place isn't like this, is it? Are you some sort of pervo as well?" she asked.

"No..." he stammered as he tried to think up something clever to say. Before he could, she had hopped up on the couch and pulled a whip off of the wall and began making whipping sounds.

"Is this the type of weapon you're looking for? I don't think it will do much to those people out there, at least not according to the news."

"I don't think you want to be touching that. You don't know where it's been," he said. Rudy laughed as her face went from mild amusement to outright disgust as it dawned on her exactly what she was doing. The whip fell to the ground, and she ran into the kitchen and began washing her hands.

Rudy followed her. When she was done, she pulled open the fridge and discovered that it was just as sad as Rudy's spread. There was beer though. She grabbed one off of the shelf and tossed one to Rudy.

"Are you even old enough to be drinking one of these?" Rudy asked.

"Pshh. Of course I'm old enough... in Canada. What about you with that babyface?" she shot back.

Rudy popped the top off the beer and took down a swig. It was horrible. Despite all of the wild ideas he had about how beer actually tasted, it tasted nothing like what he had expected. He could not hide his disgust, which made the girl laugh even harder. Suddenly, he realized he didn't even know her name.

"My name is Rudy," he sputtered, trying not to gag at the taste of the beer.

"First beer, huh, Rudy? Don't worry; it'll grow on you. My name is Amanda. You go to Portland State, right? I've seen you around there."

The idea that someone would see him around and still talk to him was a new concept for Rudy. The idea that someone would notice him at all was news as well. "Yeah. I'm a junior. What about you?

"What about me?" she said as she took a swig from her beer.

"Do you go to Portland State?"

She laughed at him then, "No. I just stalk random guys on campus."

"Oh."

Amanda slapped him on the arm, "I'm just joking. Of course, I go to PSU. I'm a theater major."

Despite his revulsion, Rudy took another sip from the beer. They journeyed into another part of the apartment. It looked like the British man's bedroom. It was somewhat less freaky than the rest of the apartment. Rudy didn't know why, but it was comforting to know that the man at least slept in a normal space. Amanda pointed at the ceiling; it was covered in mirrors. There was also a camera on a tripod in the corner.

Amanda began fiddling with the camera, but Rudy had his eye on a display that was on the wall. In a wooden display case, two swords hung on the wall. Rudy's eyes were large as he approached the swords. He was no sword expert, but he thought they looked Japanese or Chinese maybe. He reached up and pulled the curved blade off of the wall. There was another shorter sword underneath, but it was the larger one that he was interested in. The weight of the sword surprised him, but the way it moved in his hand felt good. If one of those things showed up again he could definitely do some damage.

"Hey. Check this out," Amanda said. He walked over to her and looked at the viewfinder of the video camera. On the camera, his neighbor was half-clothed and having sex with some sort of inflatable doll. Rudy didn't watch for long, but Amanda kept watching and laughing. The laughing didn't continue for long though, as outside the bedroom window, an orange glow could be seen.

Rudy walked over to the window and peered through the blinds at the building next door. It was engulfed in flames. As he watched, a body fell from an upper floor where the flames were the thickest. Cinders and ashes floated past the window. It was only a matter of time before the building they were in would go up in flames as well; of that he was certain.

Amanda, all mirth gone, snaked an arm around his.

Rudy looked at her, feeling as if he were dreaming. "Grab that other sword. I think we're going to need it."

Chapter 45: To Sleep or Not to Sleep

Mort's face rested on the cool tile of the bathroom floor. In his hand he held a bottle of pills that he had pulled from the cupboard behind the mirror. Ms. Luella Bates must have suffered from insomnia judging by the wealth of Ambien that she had in her possession. His eyes moved back and forth as the creatures outside continued to try and find him. He could see three sets of shoes through the crack beneath the doorway.

There was no window in the bathroom, or else he would have jumped out of it long ago. He couldn't stand the thought of turning the gun on himself. Instead, all he had was a bottle of Ambien. He was debating taking the pills. Mort could just pop a handful of those bad boys in his mouth and hop a train to eternal sleep. He looked at one of the oval pills. Pink with the letters "AMB" printed on it... he wondered how many of the things he would have to choke down to end it all.

The last thing he wanted to do was take the pills and still be semi-conscious if those things made their way inside. He couldn't imagine being eaten alive. The real question was, "If he took the pills and overdosed, would he come back from the dead?" In the end, he didn't really care. All he wanted was to not hurt anymore, and if dying from an overdose of sleeping pills was the only option to avoid being ripped apart by cannibals, well, then that was how it had to be.

When he turned on the tap for some water, the banging intensified. He would have to choke these things down quick. They would be in here in no time. Thankfully, the house seemed to be of older construction. If it was a newer house, the door would have been busted down by now, and he would be rotting in the stomachs of three dead motherfuckers.

He held his lips to the stream of water and choked down a pill. He had never been good at swallowing pills. The best he could ever do was swallow them one at a time. He put another pill in his mouth, as he bent down to the tap, he jumped. A gunshot rang out in the hallway, followed by another, and then a third. Bodies slumped to the ground.

He stood there, not moving, a pill slowly turning bitter in his mouth.

"Anybody in there?" a nasally voice asked.

Mort stood there dumbfounded for a second. Then he finally found his voice. He spit the pill into the sink, and yelled, "I'm in here!" He moved closer to the door, and asked, "They all dead?"

"For the second time, my friend. You can come on out now."

Mort opened the door and two bodies fell at his feet. He jumped backwards but they didn't move. They were dead along with another one on the landing. His savior stood at the top of the stairwell. He looked to be a hillbilly sort. Cowboy boots, a white T-shirt, and blue jeans held up by a plain leather belt with a huge, brass eagle belt buckle, this was not the man that Mort had envisioned saving him.

"C'mon now. Move yer ass. Them gunshots'll be bringin' some more of them things in no time at all."

The man turned around and walked away, as if he expected Mort to follow. Mort decided that maybe it wouldn't be such a bad idea. The man was a good shot. He yawned as he stumbled down the stairs. Mort was starting to feel very sleepy.

Chapter 46: Becoming Chaos

Ace stood in the hallway looking at the body of Jungle Fever lying on a cell floor. His eyes were open, but unseeing. A bullet hole yawned black and bloody in his forehead.  The hallway echoed with yelling. People shouted at him to free them. He didn't care about them. They could all go fuck themselves are far as he was concerned.

He ran down the hallway, yelling for Tak. Eventually he found him... or what was left of him. It looked like his cellmate had been eating him. There were bullet holes in both of their heads, but Tak's cellmate didn't look to have any major damage besides the bullet hole.

How was he going to tell Tak's mom? That was the first thought that popped into his head. It was a ridiculous thought when it ran through his head the second time. Tak's mom was 5,000 miles away, and even if she were here, what would he say? An American ate your son in jail?

Ace was still figuring out his next move as he walked up and down the cellblock, releasing everyone who was still alive. There were several corpses, but none of them seemed to be moving around. It was the head that did it. Pop the melon, drop the felon. It sounded like a good song lyric, but he knew that he would never write another song again.

This was the day. Today was the day that Ace became who he had always wanted to be, who he had pretended to be when he was on stage. Today was the day that Ace became chaos incarnate. In a country falling apart, with no ties or loyalties to anyone, 5,000 miles away from home. If today wasn't the day, then there would never be a day.

As Ace released the last person, they huddled in front of the door to the cellblock debating the next course of action.

"What are we going to do?" a bearded man shouted.

"I need to get back to my family," shouted another.

"What the fuck is going on out there?" said a man in an Electric Fever T-shirt.

Ace called for their attention, thumbing through his limited knowledge of English in his mind. "We got to live. They got to die."

They looked at him, each man privately deciding if he was a madman or a genius. The war went on for too long, so Ace said, "It's time. Time to fight for your life."

With that, Ace turned around and unlocked the door. He let them through while he calmly waited. When the last person had filed through the doorway he tossed the keys on the ground, and strolled out behind them.

They ran, screaming through the police station, their fear manifesting itself as violence, swollen, mechanical, and born from the unknown. Ace kicked down a door to an office that he passed. He fought the urge to riot with the mob, to let Ace Fever come to the forefront and assert his control.

They smashed windows, knocked over desks and broke anything that could be broken as they surged through the hallways of the police station. As they reached a stairwell that would take them up to the main floor, they were greeted by two cops, handguns and mace at the ready. They stood at the top of the stairs blocking the way. By now, the crowd, 17-men strong, had built up enough inertia that not even the sight of a policeman's 9mm could slow them down. They romped over the cops. Even when they lost one of their number to gunfire, they kept rumbling along, an avalanche of pent up rage, confusion, and fear.

Once they hurt one cop, they couldn't stop. No one said it,  but they knew it. They had taken on a hive-like mentality now. Together, they would work to escape from the building or die trying. Perhaps they'd just keep running, right through the world, a nonstop whirlwind of violence and change picking up members and spitting them out, like seeds, ready to flower and blossom into bastions of destruction and degeneracy.

Ace walked slowly in this whirlwind, testing doors, and looking for anything that he could use as a weapon. He still had the ASP baton, but he wanted something sexier, something more definite. He laughed to himself as he heard the screams of another police officer from somewhere in the building.

After opening another door, Ace found himself face to face with a cop that was hurriedly putting on his utility belt. Ace flung open the ASP baton, and charged the man before he could pull his gun. As he brought the ASP down on his arm, he actually heard it break. The officer's arm hung there below the elbow, drooping as if there weren't bones inside. His scream was loud, so Ace clocked him across the face. Teeth clattered on the floor, and the police officer fell over on his side.

He dropped down to his knees, and pulled the cop's gun from its holster. He looked at it intently as the officer tried to crawl away from him with his one good arm. Ace wasn't familiar with firearms. He had once fired a few in a shopping mall in Honolulu, but other than that, he had rarely seen them. Guns were illegal in Japan.

He did manage to find the safety though. Ace stood over the officer, pointing the gun at the officer's face. A quick squeeze, and he would be gone. Ace's mind warred with itself. He waited for a sign, something to show him what to do. Chaos was hard.

The officer whimpered, on his back with his hands  in front of his face. Blood trickled from the corner of his mouth, as he spoke. "Please. Don't shoot. I have a family."

Ace smiled. "We all have family. Or else we would not exist." Ace turned around, and walked out of the room, leaving the cop lying there in a bloody heap on the floor. It was tough being Chaos. The ordered part of his mind, the part that had been conditioned to civilization kept telling him to kill the cop. It was justice. It was justice for Tak, justice for Jungle Fever, justice for himself.

In the end, he decided that more chaos would come from a broken and injured cop than from a dead one. He tucked his gun away, and walked through the police station. By now, the crowd had rushed on, their handiwork splattered on walls, floors, and desks. Some of their handiwork still quivered, but most were dead... or deadish.

Ace smiled to himself as he pulled a pack of cigarettes from a dead policeman's pocket. He strolled out of the police station, on a quest for some food. He was starving, and he had a lot of work to do.

Chapter 47: I'd Like to Make  a Collect Call to Armageddon

The monitors glowed with a spectral blue light as shambling humans wandered in and out of frame. Joan and Clara were doomed. Of that they both agreed. Clara might be a feisty woman and Joan might be a doctor with a spine fashioned out of steel, but together they weren’t enough to conquer the sheer number of infected humans in the hospital quarantine ward alone.

Clara had ceased being angry long ago. She still wanted to sock Joan across the jaw every now and then, but the hopelessness of their situation was becoming clearer and clearer. Their only protection was a thick door secured by a keypad and some heavy-duty steel locks. Of course, this same door was also keeping them from the things that they needed, namely food and water.

She doubted that the designers of this office had envisioned a scenario where the entire hospital would fall so quickly. “There’s no way they would need their own water or food supply,” someone had likely said at one of the production meetings. Schmucks.

All they had was a phone, their one lifeline to the outside world… and no one was answering. The police emergency line was either busy or it sent out a stock recording that told Joan to hang up and try again.

The idea of waiting in the room and starving to death was unnerving Joan, and Clara wasn’t far behind her. They hadn’t talked for a while, so Clara had to clear her throat when she spoke. “We can’t just sit here.”

Joan didn’t say anything. She just stared at the glare of the monitors, cycling through room after room, watching her former patients wander around, looking for something to eat.\

“Did you hear me? We can’t just sit here,” she repeated.

“What do you want me to do?” she said in a blunt voice. “The police aren’t answering, and if you think we’re going to make it through that mass of people, then you’re dreaming.”

Clara groaned in frustration, “There has to be something that we can do.”

Joan was silent, apparently lost in thought. “There is one thing,” she said. Clara waited patiently, even though she wanted to shake the answer out of the woman. “We could notify the CDC.”

“What good is that going to do?” Clara asked.

“Maybe nothing for us, but we might be able to help other people.”

Clara threw her hands up in frustration, “Well, make the call. Someone ought to have a chance to live at least.”

Joan flipped through a binder labeled “Emergency Scenario” and pulled out a laminated sheet of paper with a phone number on it. She grabbed the phone and began dialing the number, then she waited as the other end rang.

“Speaker,” Clara prompted. Joan did as she was asked and turned on the speakerphone.

“Hello, you have reached the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention emergency information line. Please stay on the line.” The voice was robotic and not at all comforting, but it was better than the elevator music that began playing after its brief message.

It sounded like a flute solo version of Twisted Sister’s "We’re Not Going to Take It." For a second, as she watched the monitors in front of her, the infected’s movements synced up perfectly with the music, turning the entire scene into a macabre music video, their bloody bodies moving in time to some twisted waltz.

“Who the hell picks the music for these things? Do they just pick a song off of a list?” Clara whined. She was tempted to tell Joan to simply hang up the phone. It wasn't worth the torture. Just before she was about to grab the phone out of Joan's hand and rip it out of the wall, she heard a voice over the phone.

"Hello," the voice said. "Is anybody there?"

"Yes, we're here," Joan said hastily, a fevered part of her terrified by the prospect that the man would just hang up and they'd never be able to get through again. "We have an emergency."

"What type of emergency?"

"We're not sure if it's viral or bacteriological."

"Mmm-hmm, tell me more," the man said. They heard the sounds of typing over the speakerphone.

"As far as we can tell, we're in the middle of some sort of epidemic. Whatever illness these people have, it causes them to crave human flesh. They don't speak; there's no cognition whatsoever, they're just hungry," Joan's words were an avalanche, tumbling from her mouth. The finer points of the infection were forgotten among the more horrendous aspects of the illness.

"And how is the illness spread?" asked the man on the other end of the phone in his matter-of-fact voice. He sounded like a '50s news reporter. Clara imagined him sitting at a desk with a cigarette burning in an ashtray, the glow of an ancient computer monitor reflecting off of his thick, black plastic eyeglasses.

Joan thought for a second, and then said, "I'm not 100% on this one, but I know that bites seem to spread the disease. Earlier I saw a woman who was manifesting signs of some sort of illness, cold-like, but more intense, 15 minutes later she had become one of them. Also, I know this is going to sound crazy, but it seems as if the dead are coming back to life."

The man's complete lack of shock sent a chill through Clara's spine. Something wasn't right here. He wasn't incredulous, and he seemed to take everything they said as fact. That wasn't right. "Where are you now, Joan?"

"I'm locked inside the quarantine wing of Legacy Emanuel in Portland, Oregon."

"And are you experiencing any sort of symptoms?" the voice asked.

"I don't think so, and neither is my friend," she reported back.

Clara wanted to yell at Joan for assuming that they were friends, but when the only other living person that you know of is a voice on a phone thousands of miles away, you kind of bite your tongue.

Keys clacked as the voice typed in more information, "Well, folks, I hate to break the news to you, but you're not the only ones in this position. We've had reports of this illness all over the United States, and we have reports from other countries as well. This is not strictly a U.S. event. This is a world event."

"What do you mean a world event?" Clara asked.

"I mean that things are bad all over. We're doing what we can, but right now, we know about as much as you two do about this disease."

"What are we supposed to do?" Joan asked.

"My advice to you is to sit still, and wait for the military to roll in. The country will be under martial law soon. I have it on good authority that the National Guard is being mobilized. Things should be under control in no time at all. In the meantime, keep yourselves safe, keep from being bit, and if you have to try and kill one of these things, try and damage the brain. It seems to be the only way to stop them. Good luck, ladies."

With that, the voice on the phone hung up, and it was all over. Joan and Clara looked at each other, both thinking the same thing. "We're fucked."

Chapter 48: Move Over Rover, the Army is Taking Over

General Burt Hicks hated the sound of helicopters. He hoped that whoever invented the damn things had been shot. The noise level combined with the ever-present buffeting of wind from the rotors made you feel like you were in some sort of medieval torture device. When they landed on the second tallest building in Portland, The General couldn't get off the chopper fast enough.

He was greeted on top of the building by the usual fanfare, some suited men and women who didn't know their assholes from their elbows, and a handful of soldiers... only this time they weren't wearing their full dress uniforms. His soldiers were now decked out in their finest functional battledress. Grayish-green fatigues with digital camouflage and weapons with enough punch to rip a man in half... The General would have loved the sight if they had been mobilized for some other purpose. But in just a matter of hours, those weapons would be turned upon the average American citizen.

But that's why he had five stars, because he was the man that you could call when things got ugly. General Hicks had never been accused of having a personality, and he wasn't about to start now. The fate of the country, maybe even the entire world was at stake here. If some citizens had to die, well, then some citizens had to die.

The National Guard had been mobilized around midnight the night before. Things were moving slowly on the operation, and they were severely understaffed. Many soldiers hadn't reported in, and it was clear to see why as he was flying in. The city seemed like a warzone. Even on the outskirts of the town, he saw signs of the destruction, but as they neared the city, the smoke and fire had been impossible to miss.

"Good afternoon, General," saluted one of the suited women.

"Spare me the pleasantries. What's the sitrep?" he snapped, ready to begin the sordid task of bringing this bucking bitch of a city down to the ground.

"Casualties are high. The disease seems to be spreading at an exponential rate. We received the first reports about ten days ago, but last night it erupted into a full-scale epidemic. All roads out of the city are clogged with traffic or hordes of infected. At this point, we estimate 25% of the population has been infected, 15% of that within the last day."

"Do you have any good news?"

The woman's smile was pinched as she said, "The high is supposed to be 80 degrees with about ten percent humidity."

The General looked at the woman. "Is that supposed to be a joke?"

"No, sir. It was the only good piece of news that I could come up with off the top of my head."

The General stopped walking and looked the woman in the eye as he spoke, "The next time someone asks you if there's any good news, you say, 'I'm still alive.' That's the best news anyone can possibly have. If you're able to think and breathe, well, you've always got good news in your back pocket. Now let's get our asses on the news."

****

Around the city, handfuls of people watched as the grizzled man with the wrinkled face, the gray buzz cut, and the chest full of commendations spoke on the news.

"At this time, Portland is now under martial law. Those who feel ill need to put a white flag on their door. We will get to you eventually. Stay in your houses. Avoid contact with others. Curfew is at 5 o'clock. Anyone caught looting, or engaged in other uncivil activities, will be shot on sight.

"We are in a state of emergency. We need your help to keep this disease from spreading outside of the city. Stay in your house. Do not attempt to leave the city. All vehicles will be stopped... one way or another. This is for your safety, so help us do our job, and we can all get back to normal within a few days hopefully."

The General disappeared, and a newswoman came on the air. Her eyes were red, and it looked like she had been crying. A number flashed across the screen and citizens were urged to call the number if they had an emergency.

Those that tried to call soon found the number just as busy and useless as 911. Throughout the city, gunshots could be heard as helicopters buzzed through the sky. Things were not looking good in Portland.

****

The General walked through the corridors of the news station, until he came to the room that had been set up as his forward command. He sat at the desk and began going through the maps. Known activity for the infected was marked on the first map, collected from unanswered police calls, satellite imagery, and their own soldiers' observations. He was disheartened by what he saw. It was all over the city. There wasn't a single area of more than a few blocks that didn't seem to be touched.

He flipped the page and saw another map; this one slightly larger. The outlying areas had experienced the same sort of growth. Things weren't going south. They had gone south before the call was even put in.

The General flipped another page... this time he had a map of the entire United States. He didn't even bother flipping to the next map, the one of the entire world.

Instead, The General stood looking out the floor to ceiling window on the 35th floor of the second tallest building in Portland. The tallest building was on fire, burning from the ground up it looked like.

He stood with his hands behind his back, trying to put together a plan that would get this country back in order, a plan that would keep the dead in the ground.

Someone knocked on the door. "Enter," he called. He hoped the eggheads were having better luck coming up with a solution than he was.

It was a soldier, a young sort, not the sort of dull-eyed veteran he was used to ordering around. He could almost smell the kid's unease as he stood there. He turned away from the majestic view of burning Portland and said, "Speak."

"Sir, we just received notification that the President and the rest of the cabinet have been moved underground. Things in D.C. have escalated." The soldiers eyes became impossibly wide.

Fucking part-timers. What was it now? The General turned to see what had the kid so spooked. As he spun around, he had time to glimpse a helicopter spinning out of control, infected civilians and soldiers hanging off of the skids. The pilot was fighting the bird, and it was spinning directly towards them. The General had time to wish for a cigarette before the main rotor hit the thick glass of the skyscraper.

The room erupted in a shower of deadly glass shards, one of which went right through The General's mid-section. He didn't even have time to fall as the helicopter disintegrated and then erupted, spewing fire all over the 35th floor of the second tallest building in Portland.

Much of the wreckage of the helicopter fell to the ground. Throughout the city, dead, unfocusing eyes turned their attention to the explosion of the skyscraper. They watched the flames with impassive faces, their feet moving at a methodical pace towards the place where the latest sign of prey had come from.

All around the city, the living hid in their houses, peering out the windows, waiting for the dead to come calling.

Prologue

The branches scratched at her face and arms as she scrambled down the slope, dewy grass and vicious briars caressing her ankles. The moans from above rained down upon her, driving her like a steer in the midst of a stampede. Wild tangles of blonde hair caught on branches that reached out to her like angry lovers. Her eyes were wide, and she flailed with her arms as she burst through the trees, ignoring the pain.

At the bottom of the slope, she splashed into brackish, knee-deep water, brown like tea, lifeless and stale. The screams from the top of the hill drifted across the morning air, hitting her ears like lashes from a whip, forcing her faster through the water, if it could even be called that. It was more like nature's sewage. She hooked her foot on a submerged root and tumbled down, filling her mouth with the flavor of decaying leaves and mud. She gasped for air, gagging and spitting in between harried breaths. With trembling hands, she wiped her hair out of her face and continued her slog.

She had no idea where she was running. All she knew was that she had to get away. She had to get away from the carnage that was happening just over the rise. A highway, swollen with unmoving vehicles, bodies piling up as hordes of the dead swarmed over the trapped occupants. Suzy risked a look over her shoulder. He wasn't there, the handsome man who had helped wasn't following. By now he was probably dead. His name had been Dustin; add it to the growing list of people, including her brother, that had died within the last 12 hours.

She saw the first one crest the rise as she stood knee-deep in cold, rotten water. Was it him? No. It was not him. It was a lumbering man, huge even from this distance. His uncoordinated steps moved him closer to her, and then he hit the edge of the slope, tumbling down awkwardly, arms and legs incapable of stopping his descent. He came to a rest at the bottom of the slope, shreds of flesh hung from the ashen skin of his snapped arm.

The creature looked up at her, teeth bared as it attempted to extricate itself from the mass of branches that it had come to rest in. New tears in its flesh had no effect upon it. It was of one mind, one single purpose. It wanted to kill her. It wanted to strip the flesh off of her bones. It wanted to eat her. The terror welled up in her once more, and the reasonable part of her mind shrunk to the back of her brain; the wild-eyed part came forward and sent her splashing through the pond. She ran straight ahead, not even thinking, and planted her hands against a rough concrete wall, a sound barrier erected to protect the occupants of the houses on the other side from having to experience the constant noise of the city's always busy freeway.

Her fractured mind clawed at the ridged stone wall, searching aimlessly for a way to scale the obstruction that separated her from escape. In an effort to try and scale the fifteen-foot wall before her, she plugged her fingers between the ridges of stone that comprised the surface of the wall, designed to break the sound of the freeway with their irregular shape. She was three-feet off the ground when she lost a fingernail and fell to the ground, too frightened to even swear at her failure. She clutched her ruined finger to her chest, wrapped in a fist to halt the stinging pain of a suddenly missing fingernail.

Suzy chanced another glance over her shoulder to see the creature fording its way through the rotten pond. Her breath came in ragged gasps, but stopped altogether as she saw more creatures pop up over the rise of the hill. All along the ridge they came, stumbling, tumbling, tangles of limbs with only one thing on their mind.

She should have stayed in the car.

As the closest creature neared her, she began a half-jog that took her along the length of the wall. Her left hand trailed along the cold, ridged barrier as she ran towards the sun. The wall ended a half-mile up the road, back in the direction they had come from. She could see the way. A line of the undead was marshalling from the highway towards the wall, slowly moving, threatening to trap her between their advance and the wall she now hugged for support. She picked up her pace, breathing raggedly, her legs thumping into the ground, tired legs, stretched to the limit, filled with an ache that she could not stop to quell. Her pursuers had no aches. They experienced no pain.

She was closer now, but so were they. Sweat cooled on her body in the chill morning air, her breath puffing in front of her face, hanging for a second and then disappearing. Suzy felt as if she were a child playing some obscene game of tag, only the entire world was "it" and the stakes were life or death. There would be no running inside the house for a cool cup of water from a pastel-green plastic cup.

She was five-hundred feet from the end of the wall when the first creature managed to reach her. It was a woman, or at least it used to be a woman, somewhat shorter than Suzy. She had been tan, and until recently, she had been alive. Fresh blood plastered the woman's shirt to her chest, her curly blonde hair backlit by the orange sun. Her hands reached out to Suzy, and she slapped them away from her, putting on a burst of speed.

They were there now, about twenty of them between her and the end of the wall. They were slow and spread out. There was a chance. It wasn't hopeless.

A wind kicked up, and a helicopter appeared in the distance, not a regular old news helicopter, but something far more deadly. It had the look of the military about it, sharp angles that screamed death. It flew low, and it flew fast, the thumping sound of it approaching faster than the actual helicopter itself. It crossed in front of the sun, and then it created a sun of its own, spraying thirty millimeter rounds all around her.

The bodies in front of her exploded. Arms flew into the air amid clouds of dust and clods of dirt. She watched as one of the creatures was cut in half twenty-feet away; the ragged ends of the woman's body looked like raw hamburger. Globs of gore flew through the air, splattering herself and the wall.

The noise was deafening, the thump of the helicopter's rotors as they sliced through the air, the screams from the freeway, the explosion of the helicopters gunfire, and the shredding of ground and flesh. When a hand wrapped around her, from behind, she couldn't even hear her own scream.

The pilot of the helicopter swore and swiveled the Apache in line with the woman. When he saw blood, he signaled the gunner sitting in the cockpit below him, and he loosed another volley, turning the woman and her attacker into pulp. He shook his head as he turned back to the freeway. It would have been nice to have saved at least one person, even if it was just so she could fight another day.

BOOK 2:

 WE ALL FALL DOWN

Chapter 1: The Dinner Bell

Their flight from the apartment building hadn't taken long at all. As soon as they saw that the building next door was on fire, Rudy had run to his room and grabbed his backpack, an old beat up thing with the word "Jansport" stitched across the top of the blue canvas. He stuffed a few items of clothing in it, and then he emerged from his apartment to find Amanda waiting there for him.

"That was quick," he had said.

Her hair was brown and tied in a ponytail. It bobbed as she spoke, "I don't have much here, not much that's important anyway. I just have some clothes, my phone and my phone charger."

"Who are you going to call with that phone?"

"Ghostbusters?"

Rudy shook his head as they walked down the hallway and down the steps, bags slung over their shoulders and swords in hand. The swords had come from his asshole neighbor's weird, sex dungeon apartment. Correction, his dead asshole neighbor's weird, sex dungeon apartment. Rudy paused at the second-floor landing. "There's something we have to do."

Amanda threw her hands in the air. "What is it now? The damn building next door is on fire... and I don't hear any fire trucks headed our way."

Without speaking, Rudy opened the door to the second floor, and stepped into the hallway. "Which room was it?" he muttered to himself. He stopped in front of the door to apartment 211, and he knocked gently on the door, not wanting to make too much noise, in case more of those things were around. There was no answer.

Maybe she's gone, he thought, surprised that he actually cared. She had saved him. When he had fled from his apartment down the rickety fire escape, she had pulled him into her apartment through the window, just as the entire structure had collapsed to the ground, crushing his would-be murderers. He would be dead right now if it weren't for her. He owed it to her, so he banged on the door, harder this time.

"Chloe! Open up!" The fact that she was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen up close probably had nothing to do with the fact that he wanted to save her... probably. He was about to turn and leave when the door opened a crack, just wide enough for two things to appear, an eye and the cavernous barrel of a gun.

"What do you want?"

Amanda ducked behind Rudy, her hot little hands placed on his bulky shoulders. "Um, well... we uhh."

Amanda spoke for him, as he had forgotten the art of rudimentary communication. "The building next door is on fire, we need to get out of here before we all get burned into ash."

"Who are you? Step out here so I can see you." The woman on the other side of the door gestured with the gun. Amanda stepped out from behind Rudy so that the woman on the other side of the door could see her. She looked her up and down, her big blue eye peering through the cracked door. "You seem harmless enough. You his girlfriend?"

Amanda's laugh pricked Rudy's pride, but he managed to keep his face from turning beat red. "I'm just his neighbor," she said, unaware of the damage that she had inflicted on Rudy.

Chloe bobbed her head, as if she already knew the answer. "Now what is this burning building business?"

"She's right. The building next door is on fire, and it's only a matter of time before this one goes up as well. We have to get out of here." Rudy's voice was a whine, filled with a hormonal desperation.

There was silence. The woman on the other side of the door was thinking.

"I just thought... that since you saved me, I ought to do the same for you."

The woman on the other side of the door spoke as if Rudy had said nothing. "Where are we going to go? It's not safe out there."

Amanda and Rudy looked at each other. They hadn't yet discussed where to go. "Anywhere that's not a burning building," Amanda said.

"Give me a minute," the woman said before slamming the door closed.

Rudy and Amanda stood in the hallway, Rudy leaning against the wall, while Amanda rocked on her heels with nervous energy. When Chloe emerged from her apartment, she had a bag over her shoulder and the gun in her hand, a silver automatic that made Rudy nervous. Rudy tried to keep from looking too long at her, her tan skin, smooth and glowing, her perfectly straight shoulder-length hair, but most of all, he tried to keep from staring at her breasts, large round and snug in a light blue T-shirt that exposed just a sliver of midriff.

"Let me help you with that," he said as he reached for her bag. Her reaction was quick, and showed Rudy exactly where he was on Chloe's list of priorities.

With the barrel of the gun against the side of his nose, Chloe said, "I don't need your help. We're not best friends. We're not going on a vacation. The world is fucked, and I'll stick with you guys until I can, but if it comes down to it, and it's you or me, well then I vote me. So don't go getting all sentimental on me. I don't need any new friends. All the ones I have are probably dead anyway. Let's just get the hell out of here and get someplace safe. We clear?"

Rudy felt like he was going to crap his pants. "We're clear."

With that, Chloe stalked down the hall, her blonde hair not even moving, her ass crammed tightly into jeans that seemed to have been made just for her.

"I love your friends," Amanda said as she patted him on the arm and smiled. She followed after Chloe. Rudy trailed after, and they walked to the lobby of the apartment building. They stood there looking out on a world that had seemingly changed overnight. The streets were empty of people, living ones at least. Creatures shambled along, looking for food, but they were spread out. They could move around them. Rudy hefted the sword in his hand. He could do this.

"Alright, I heard on the news that the head is the only way to kill them. You have to damage the brain," Chloe said in a no-nonsense fashion.

Amanda looked at Chloe in shock. "I don't think I can kill anyone. What if they're not dead? What if there's some way to save them?"

Chloe sneered at Amanda. "You want to save them? Go ahead. Me? I'm only interested in saving myself."

Rudy looked around the lobby. Then looked up as if he could see through the ceiling and the walls of the building, calculating in his head how many people were still hiding in the building. "We can't leave without letting everyone know that it's not safe here."

Chloe turned to Rudy and said, "If you want to go knock on everyone's door and play good neighbor, feel free. But I'm walking out that door, with or without you."

"How about that?" Amanda said, pointing to the red fire alarm handle behind the clerk's desk.

Rudy sauntered over to it, stopping once he saw what was behind the desk. It was the security guard, lying on the ground, covered in blood. Rudy reached for the handle for the fire alarm and then jumped as the security guard sat up, his eyes unfocused.

"You ok?" Rudy asked, sparking an extreme shift in the guard. Without warning, the guard reached out to Rudy grasping him by the legs. Rudy stumbled backwards, tripping over his own feet and falling to the ground, his teeth clacking together. The grunts and groans coming out of his labored lungs would have been comical under any other situation, but as the dead eyes of the security guard loomed over his knees, he screamed.

Amanda was there, jabbing the short sword into the guard's head, but still he came. Rudy slid backwards, unable to rise to his feet as the adrenaline rushed through his body, dulling the logic in his brain and preventing him from getting to his feet. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Amanda rear back and bring the short sword down on the guard's neck. It was a clean cut, but not powerful enough to sever the dead man's head. It did however sever the spinal cord, cutting the complex circuit of nerves and muscles that drove the creature's body. The head dropped down, hanging by a flap of flesh, and the body stopped in mid-crawl. As the final messages of the man's brain faded away, the arms slipped wide, and the body slowly settled to the ground. Rudy stared in awe as the head continued to move, the eyes blinking and the mouth opening and closing like a fish gasping for air on the bank of a river.

Amanda dropped down and looked at the man's face. He had been handsome in a blue-collar way, a stub of a goatee in a plain manly face. She felt bad for him and stood up. She stepped on the side of his near-severed head and brought the short sword down on the side of the man's skull, just above the ear. The shock of metal on bone sent pain through her arms, but she accomplished her goal, and the mouth stopped moving, the eyes stopped blinking.

Rudy pushed himself to his feet, no small feat for a man as heavy as he was. "Where were you?" he yelled at Chloe.

"I was over here, waiting to leave. You're the one that wants to save the world. If you had been looking out for yourself, it never would have happened. I hope you learned your lesson."

"Yeah, well, if you're ever in trouble, we'll just see how well I learned my lesson." Rudy stepped over the body of the security guard and pulled the alarm. The noise was immediate and definite.

Amanda wiped the blade of the short sword on the guard's body. "Sorry," she said to him, before they stepped out into the day to find that the alarm had done more than just warn the occupants of the building about an impending fire. It had drawn the attention of the shambling monsters in the streets. It was more than just a fire alarm. It was a dinner bell.

Chapter 2: Self-Service

Katie sat at the intersection, the engine of her red Dodge Durango idling quietly. She was at a crossroads, literally and figuratively. Around her, bodies moved, drawn to the promise of a fresh meal by the quiet putter of the engine. She had no intention of letting that happen. She felt the comfort of the silver revolver in her jacket pocket.

Now what? The road lay before her. The sun rose higher in the sky. She had been cruising the streets for hours, turning left and right with no destination in mind. There was surprisingly little traffic, if you didn't count the shambling dead who were even now closing in upon her. They seemed to be everywhere. In the distance, a skyscraper burned, its top floors engulfed in orange flames, black smoke spewing forth from the inferno.

More clouds of smoke joined it from various other locations in the city. Where was the fire department? Where were the people who were supposed to fix things? In the air, she saw helicopters hovering in the sky, looking like dragonflies in the distance. Katie glanced down at the gas gauge on her car. Half a tank... that wouldn't get her far, not in her gas-guzzling SUV.

The real question was would there still be a gas station that was open? She jumped as a creature pounded its open hands on her windows, smearing gore all over them. She looked at the creature's face. It had been a woman once, blue-eyes, cloudy and empty. Parts of her lips were missing exposing half of her teeth, which made it look as if it were smiling crookedly. Her green cardigan sweater was covered in dried gore, and the wedding ring on her hand glittered in the sunlight. Katie hated her.

She threw the car in reverse, and watched as the woman stumbled after her, her arms outstretched. She put the car in drive and pressed forward slowly. The creature was pushed backwards but couldn't keep pace with the slow advance of Katie's Durango. It went under, and the vehicle rocked as Katie drove over the woman in an effort to extinguish the crooked smile forever. Just to make sure, she threw it in reverse and backed up a few feet, bumping gently into another creature behind her. Fuck him too.

Over the hood of her car, she saw the woman trying to crawl towards her. Some key components of her body were broken, but still she crawled. Katie lined up the creature's head with her driver's side tire, and then she stepped on the accelerator. She saw the creature's hand come up as if to try and stop the car, and then it was gone. The car shook violently, the vehicle's steel frame rattling as she drove over the creature's head. Katie pulled the Durango in a wide circle to come around one more time if she needed to. She didn't. The creature's head was smashed, the insides oozing onto the hot morning concrete. She felt better.

Katie pressed on, weaving in and out of the dead who wandered the streets. Where were they all coming from? How many people had died in the night? She turned on the radio to clear her mind. She punched a button and tuned the Durango's radio to her favorite station, a pop station that played light, forgettable fare punctuated by obnoxious DJs who thought they were more hilarious than they actually were. There was nothing, just a hum. Katie punched the seek button on her car stereo and waited for it to find a different station. The first station that it stopped on was a station that she typically associated with oldies, old white boys singing about girls and summer to the accompaniment of guitars, bass, and drums. It was not her scene, but today there was something else on the radio. Instead of the usual thoughtless tunes, a recording was playing. She listened intently as the deep male voice dropped information in a loop that ran for a minute before playing over.

"This is a public service announcement. The city of Portland is under martial law. All citizens are requested to remain inside. If you have need of police, fire, or medical service dial 911. Do not, under any circumstances, leave your house. Stay in your home, barricade your doors and windows, and listen to the radio for further updates. Citizens on the street are putting their lives at risk. Stay inside."

The message started again from the beginning. Stay inside... what a joke. There was no way Katie was going back to her house to sit by herself, replaying the final moments of her family in a house that was now filled with nothing but memories. Lost in thought, she pulled into a gas station and threw the car into park.

She didn't know why she did it, but she sat in the car waiting, as if a gas station attendant were going to come out at any moment and pump the gas for her. She pressed the seek button again, and another station came on. This time, she found a talk radio station. She didn't pay attention to the words as she looked around. The lights on the gas station's mini-mart were still on, and around her, creatures were moving. She could feel them closing in on her, their eyes drawn to her movements.

She opened her door and stepped out of the car, lifting the lever that popped open the little door to her gas tank. She stepped up to the pump and lifted it off of the hook. She unscrewed her gas cap and was greeted by the pungent odor of gasoline. She pressed the yellow fuel selector button and breathed a brief sigh of relief as she felt the magic liquid course through the hose, down the nozzle, and into her tank.

Katie kept her head on a swivel as the machine pumped, numbers ticking by and pumping mechanisms clicking. Outside the quiet environment of her car, she could hear the horror of Portland. In the distance, a fire crackled and there were scattered batches of gunfire. The moans of the dead filled the city and made her skin crawl. She could see them, moving towards her, getting closer with every second. She had never wanted a Prius more than at that moment, a nice electric car that didn't need so much gasoline... she would have been out of there by now.

The doors to the gas station slid open, and an attendant came out, his blue work shirt covered in his own blood. He was closer than she wanted him to be, so she pulled her gun free of her jacket. She thumbed the safety off, just as Fred Walker had showed her, and she aimed the gun at the attendant, his pale face locked in a scream. She didn't want to fire, not standing next to a gas pump which was connected to who knew how many gallons of gasoline. What good was surviving if you just blew your ass up at the first opportunity?

When she reckoned that the man had gotten close enough, she pulled the nozzle out of her car and placed it back on the hook for the next lucky customer. After screwing the gas cap back on, she held the gun up to the attendant's head and pulled the trigger, hoping against hope that she wasn't giving herself a funeral by fireball.

The man fell over, and the dead faces in the street, if they hadn't yet turned in her direction, had done so by now, drawn by the loud crack of the revolver that left Katie's ears ringing. She hurried inside the store and grabbed some necessary supplies. Then she hustled over to her car door and hopped into the driver's seat, slamming the door shut behind her. She turned the engine on and cruised away. That was simple, she thought.

The voices on the radio droned on in their librarian tones. It was a local program, and they were doing their duty. Despite the fact that they probably had family in the city, they were sticking it out, behind their consoles, probably dreaming of some sort of glorious journalism award. How altruistic of them.

A man with a deep voice proclaimed, "Everything is going to be alright. The military is here, and things will be under control soon."

His counterpart, a man with a nasally voice said, "Remember to stay off the streets. If you absolutely must leave your home, head to the rescue station at the Memorial Coliseum. The highways are locked up tight with stalled and abandoned vehicles. For now, there is no way out of the city, except by air or by boat."

Rescue... rescue was as good a proposition as any she had heard. She punched up directions to the Memorial Coliseum on the GPS sitting on her dashboard. It was an underused birthday gift from her husband... her husband. Maybe they could rescue her from her own thoughts, she mused as she stepped on the accelerator, dodging the bodies that clogged the streets.

Chapter 3: Pretty Big Balls

The problem was present. It had to be dealt with. Thirty or forty bodies moving through the dilapidated tenement, adding more to their ranks with each step they took. The undead were tireless. Groggy junkies waking from a night of abusing their own bodies were no match for a mass of indefatigable automatons searching for one thing and one thing only... live flesh.

Zeke planted himself against the door, his ear to the cheap wood. Behind him was a scene that would be considered a nightmare in ordinary times. A large black man lay on the bed, a bullet wound through his head, his brains splattered on the dirty mattress. Blood ran down the wall. A naked woman in chains rotted on the mattress next to him, her fingers frozen in a claw that was mid-dig in the man's dead body. The twice dead girl's eyes looked at him, accusing. He had put the bullet hole in her forehead, and he would have done it again.

He didn't know how the girl had wound up there. Had she died of an overdose? Had she always been a prisoner? Zeke didn't want to know. It wasn't his problem. He looked over at the man that occupied the room with him, Lou, the son of the man lying on the mattress. Lou had put the bullet through his father's head himself. Zeke respected that. Lou could have left the task to Zeke, and he would have done it gladly, but he had cleaned up his own mess. Sure, Gary Lee's depravity wasn't caused by Lou, but it was still his mess. We're all responsible for our families in one way or another.

As he was thinking, he heard their approach. Muffled screams could be heard from other parts of the building. When the wrought-iron fence out front had failed and the dead had flooded the courtyard of the tenement, Zeke knew they only had one chance. They had to stay put at the farthest end of the building and let the mass of the undead spread out. Alone, they could be dealt with. As a mass, even the best-trained soldier would find himself outnumbered and overwhelmed by the throng of unyielding dead.

The moans and screams came closer. The sounds of scattered gun shots echoed through the tenement's flimsy walls, but they didn't last for long. Zeke pressed his hand to the shattered doorjamb, holding the door as closed as he could. He looked over at Lou. He was harder than he looked; harder than a lot of soldiers he had encountered in his own time. There was nothing quite like a youth spent on a street full of danger with a twisted, drug dealer for a father to temper a man's steel. Zeke had seen the man's mettle for himself in the police station that they had escaped from, a station that now was likely little more than an animated morgue.

The moans and screams were closer. He heard feet pounding down the warped wooden floor in the hallway.

"Help!" a man screamed.

Zeke looked over at Lou and shook his head. The man couldn't be helped, he was a liability, an unknown. Survival was number one right now. If Zeke gave the go-ahead, Lou would save the man without hesitation, but there was no way of knowing if the man was bit or sick. One bite. That's all it seemed to take. It wasn't worth the risk. If they let the man in and he was bitten, there would only be one thing to do, put something to the head... either a bullet or a boot. Either way, that would bring attention that they didn't need. They heard banging on a door down the hallway from where they hid. They heard the splintering of wood, and then they heard more footsteps, different from the ones that came before. They were shuffling movements, sliding through the refuse of the tenement's hallways. Then the screaming came.

They stood in silence as an entire building of people became an entire building of the dead, except for the two of them. Zeke didn't know how long they stood in the quiet, but the room had heated up as the sun rose, baking the corner apartment on the third floor. The smell of decaying corpses had grown, and his body was covered in sweat. They had to get out. It was time.

"You ready?"

Lou, who had been silent for most of their watch, nodded his head, sweat pouring off the smooth brown skin of his bald head. Zeke pushed the door open slowly and stepped out into the dimly lit hall of the tenement. Though it was the middle of the day, most of the windows had been broken and boarded up. Sunlight and heat filtered into the hallways in scattered rays, and the dead lingered. Zeke breathed deeply, trying to rid himself of the odor of the nightmare they had left behind. The smell in the tenement hallway wasn't much better; it still smelled of urine and the deceased, but it wasn't nearly as strong.

Through the narrow corridor, they moved like cats stalking prey, Zeke taking the lead. He inched forward, heel to toe, avoiding the scattered refuse that littered the floor of the hallway, discarded syringes, empty baggies, and fast food wrappers. The door to the first room they came to was boarded up. That was good. They slid past it, watching where their feet went.

As they approached the next door, they heard the sound of it first. A subtle creak in the floorboards, a disturbance in the air pressure, something was in there, and the door was hanging off of its hinges. This must be the room where the unlucky screamer had tried to hide. Zeke brought the sight of the gun up to eye level, and turned quickly, taking in all the information he could, as fast as he could. Three bodies, two squatting over the form of another, their backs to the door. Good, he thought. Let's keep it that way.

Zeke glided past the door, his gun at the ready, and then he motioned Lou forward with a wave of his hand. His breath caught in his throat, as Lou moved past the door, but he made it without incident, and he exhaled silently through his nose, a long deep breath. If the zombies didn't kill him, the damn stress would.

They continued through the hallway, approaching the landing of the third floor, a murky square room that had been populated by drug-abusing trash on couches with stained cushions and exposed stuffing the last time they had come through. Down the hallway that led to the other half of the third-floor, Zeke could see one of the dead, standing in a corner as if it had done something wrong. The sight of Zeke's gun never deviated from its head, even when he chanced a peek around the corner to scope out the landing.

There was no one there. The things seemed to appreciate the path of least resistance. There were few of them on the third floor, but you could be damned sure the second floor and the first floor were literally crawling with the things. Zeke heel-toed out into the landing, sweat beading on his brow, Lou two-feet behind him, the way he had told him to be. The wild part of Zeke, that instinctual being that was locked away in his brain, screamed for him to lay the creature out, lay them all out. He knew it wouldn't be any good. They were in a city of the dead, with a few handfuls of ammunition and nowhere to run.

He moved forward across the stained, red carpeting and looked over the edge of the landing, trying to see what was awaiting them. There were none on the stairs; that's all he could tell. When would this end?

Zeke crouched low, and inched forward down the stairs, resisting the temptation to go down head first so he could see what was waiting in the next room. It wasn't long before he no longer needed to worry. He was halfway down the stairs when the first moan alerted him to their presence. The landing was populated by four of the creatures, fresh and bloody, and there was nothing he could do but squeeze the trigger.

His ears rang after the first shot. By the time he had pulled the trigger a fifth time, he could barely hear it. Lou was firing his pistol as well. Their accuracy was shit. Lou was no marksman, and a submachine gun wasn't necessarily the type of weapon Zeke would have picked for precision. Nevertheless, the dead died again, and as their feet hit the second landing, they picked up their pace, knowing that whatever was lurking in the building was now most likely after them, honing in like sharks on a bleeding fish. They would not be an easy meal.

"Let's move our asses," Zeke said, the bullets freeing him from all restrictions on speaking. He sprinted to the next stairwell, past corpses that would now stay dead forever, their brains splattered all over the abused couches, walls, and floor.

"I can't wait to get out of this place," Lou whispered, though by now it was unnecessary as the moans of the dead filled the hallways. At the top of the stairs, Zeke looked down and put his finger on the trigger, squeezing off rounds as the tide of the dead surged up from the bottom floor. The dead fell but were replaced by more faster than he could shoot. When his gun clicked empty, he stepped back to reload. Lou stepped into his place and fired more rounds. By the time, Lou's gun was out of bullets, the battle was already lost.

The dead were an unstoppable force. Zeke slammed the new clip home, and pulled the cocking mechanism back, while Lou fumbled with his handgun. Zeke was thankful that it wasn't a revolver. The stairs were hopeless. Zeke could see that now. He turned and was about to tell Lou the same thing, when he spied movement out of the corner of his eye. With Lou focused on reloading, he hadn't noticed the gnarled fingers of a skinny woman with pale skin reaching out for him from behind, her mouth already open and ready to ruin Lou's day.

"Down!" he yelled. Had Lou hesitated for even a second, he would have been dead or well on his way towards it. But he didn't. He dropped to the ground immediately, and Zeke leveled his gun at the woman's head, firing several rounds to make sure he got the job done right. The pink mist that erupted from her destroyed eye was proof that he still had it, the ability to kill, the ability to react to a shitty situation without thinking about it. Lou jammed the clip home in the handgun as he popped up off the ground, and they moved down the hallway as the first of the dead reached the landing. There was no time to formulate a plan. There was no plan to be formed. This was pure survival. He could taste its metallic flavor in the back of his throat, his heart beating as if it wanted out of his chest. More dead lined the hallways of the second floor, slowly advancing on them.

Lou cocked his gun and fired as Zeke took out another one of the dead. They moved through the hallway, putting down six of them, their aim improving with every shot, but they were still burning through ammo, and there was no time to refill the clips. They moved to the end of the hallway on the second floor, leaving bodies in their wake. Zeke looked over his shoulder, and shuddered at the mob that was approaching. They had put some distance between themselves and the mass, but they would be here in another moment.

Zeke tried the handle of the door. When it didn't budge, he took a step back and kicked the door with every ounce of strength he could muster. It flew inward. On the bed, a skinny man in a wifebeater sat up, a needle hanging out of his arm. Now was not the time for hesitation. Zeke didn't care if he was alive or dead, so he put a bullet through his head.

They stepped inside of the room. It was a crash pad, a stained mattress on the floor, a rotting body, and a beat up old loveseat in the corner. "Help me!" he yelled to Lou as he hastened to the loveseat. They dragged it across the scarred wooden floor and pressed it up against the broken door. It wasn't much of a barricade, but it would give them the time to reload.

Zeke pulled out the empty clip he had put in his pocket and began thumbing in rounds of ammunition that floated in his other pocket. He pulled the half-empty clip from the machine gun and did the same as the sound of the first fist on the door hit. More fists followed, and the cheap wood vibrated with the force. When he finished loading the second clip, he saw that Lou had done the same, back against the loveseat and his legs dug into the ground, preventing the dead from forcing their way inside.

Zeke ran to the window and threw it open. The apartment opened on the backside of the building. The ground below was solid concrete, but it was clear. Still, a twenty foot drop was not a thing to be taken lightly. He thought about throwing the mattress out the window to break their fall, but when a rotten fist punched through the wood of the door, he abandoned the idea.

"Looks like we're going to have to jump. You want to go first or second?"

"You go. I'll be right behind you."

"You sure you don't want to go first?"

Lou looked at him as if he were from another planet. "Man, are you scared?"

Zeke looked out the window. "It's a long way down."

"Get out that goddamn window, before I shoot you myself." Zeke smiled at Lou as he threw the window up and leaned out.

Zeke rested his gun on the ground. "Before you jump out, toss this bad boy down to me. I don't want to damage it in the fall." Lou nodded his head. "Man, that's a long way down," Zeke said as he climbed out the window. He dropped down, clinging to the windowsill to lessen the distance that he would have to fall. The cracked and dried paint dug into his hands. He had the feeling that this was how his life was going to end, and then he let go, dropping the fifteen feet to the ground. He landed with a thump, his heart landed a few seconds later. He was alright, though he still felt the impact of the drop in his knees. He looked up in time to see the gun falling towards him. His hands reacted out of instinct, protecting his face from the falling chunk of metal. He managed to catch the gun and not shoot himself in the process. Not too shabby, he thought.

Lou appeared at the window, the gun tucked into his pants. He put his legs out the window first and then sat on the edge. From the ground, Zeke read Lou's moving lips. He thought he made out the words, "Fuck this," but he could have been wrong. Lou hesitated and paused, looking up at the sky before he dropped out the window, fear frozen on his face.

Zeke stepped out of the way. He had seen people make the mistake before of trying to catch people jumping from high places. It was a good way to get cracked in the face with an elbow. The last thing he wanted was for both of them to be lying on the ground unconscious because they had bashed heads when he tried to catch Lou. So he watched the impact, and moved in quickly to help Lou to his feet.

"You alright?"

Lou was having difficulty catching his breath.

"You alright?" he asked again, looking up at the window to see arms attached to leering faces snarling down at them.

Zeke dragged Lou down the sidewalk, away from the window as the first of the dead tumbled down to the ground. Its landing was not as graceful as Lou's had been, and it smashed it's face into the ground. When it looked up at them and tried to rise to its feet, its face no longer looked like a face.

They moved away, Lou gasping, while Zeke tugged him along with his free hand under Lou's elbow.

"What's wrong with you?"

"My balls. The shock of landing smacked my balls all around."

"Jesus. You must have some pretty big balls."

"Yeah," he said. "That makes two of us. Where the hell are we going?"

"Beats the shit out of me," Zeke said as they stumbled through the afternoon street, zombies tumbling out of the window like lemmings off a cliff behind them.

Chapter 4: Those Things'll Kill Ya

After they notified the CDC of an impending apocalypse, morale was fairly low. Finding out that the entire world was essentially in the same boat as they were would naturally have that effect. The stress of the previous night had washed over them, and they had collapsed into a sleep that was fitful, but refreshing. They had slept, waking at every knock on the door, of which there were less and less. When Joan finally sat up, blinking the sleep out of her eyes, everything was just as they had left it.

On the black and white monitors that were their only link to the outside world, the dead wandered the halls. A former quarantine officer was plastered to the door of the office they were occupying, his fingers shredded to the bone from scratching at the magnetically sealed door. In the hallways, others shifted about aimlessly, making circuits across the linoleum floor, as if they were unable to leave. They reminded her of sharks, cold and lifeless, just circling until prey made itself available.

Joan heard Clara stir behind her. She knew that Clara still harbored an anger that was finely honed and aimed right at her heart. Joan didn't blame her. She watched as Clara stretched, running a hand through her tangled, caramel brown hair. Her eyes were puffy, and the make-up that had looked so great when she had first met her in the emergency room was now smeared, giving her an abused appearance. Clara had every right to be angry. If it hadn't been for Joan, she would be out on the street. She was strong. She was a survivor. But in here, she was trapped. Hopefully, Joan could make it up to her.

Joan's responsibility was finished. She was a doctor of a hospital whose only patients were of the dead variety. The speed with which the hospital had fallen still shocked her. They had been prepared. They had known how to deal with this. But knowing and doing are two completely different things. For instance, Joan knew that they couldn't stay hidden in the room they were in indefinitely; there was no food, no water, and if the power went out, there would be no way to open the magnetically-sealed door that was keeping the dead out. The cramped office would become their tomb if that happened. She knew this, without a doubt. She knew they had to get out, but doing it... well, that was another thing entirely.

Clara rose from the bed, hopping along the linoleum floor of the office on her sprained ankle. The swelling was bad, but Joan didn't think there was anything structurally wrong with it. It would merely slow her down at a time when being slowed down was the last thing a person would want. Clara leaned over Joan's shoulder, her morning breath forming a miasma that hung in the air. It was an unpleasant smell, but considering the situation, Joan didn't feel like making a big deal about it. Joan also had a feeling that her own breath was probably not the most wonderful thing in the world either.

"No change, huh?" Clara asked.

Joan shook her head. Then she broached the topic that had been on her mind since she had awoken. "We have to leave."

Clara laughed a little bit, until she saw the look on Joan's face. "You're serious? Fuck that. We go out there, and we're going to get torn to shreds by those things."

Joan shook her head. "I know. I know what's out there and how it will likely end up, but look at the alternative. If we stay here, what happens? Best case scenario, we die from dehydration, hoping that someone will come and rescue us. If the power goes out, we're going to be locked in here. We'd never even know if someone did come to rescue us. If we wait much longer, we'll be too weak to fight our way out of here. We don't have time to waste."

Clara laughed. "If you're trying to make the case for me to kill myself, you're going to have to try harder than that."

Joan looked at Clara. She was right. Walking out that door was suicide, but so was staying inside. Slow death by dehydration or a quick one by cannibalism, it was a hell of a choice to make. "I'd rather risk it all than sit here waiting for the inevitable."

Clara sat down on the floor, her head against the wall. "I wish I had a cigarette."

"Now there's something that will kill you," Joan said.

Clara stood up, sighed, and dusted off her jeans. "Well, cigarettes aren't just going to come walking in here on their own. I guess we ought to try. What's the plan?"

****

The door popped open with a click, and the creature on the other side of the door hesitated. It had been banging on the door for so long that it was almost as if it had no idea what to do next now that the obstruction was gone. It didn't have to think for long. Plastic keys clattered on the hard floor as Clara brought a computer keyboard crashing down on the man's face. The former quarantine officer was massive, and the keyboard did not slow his advance. Behind him, more of the infected were drawn to the commotion.

Time was important now. If they were slowed here, they were as good as dead. The keys of the keyboard crunched under her feet as Clara stepped sideways. Joan stepped up to fill the void, and she smashed the security guard across the face with the metal chair legs that they had liberated from the single office chair in their would-be tomb. It was an unwieldy thing, harder to use than the keyboard, but its starfish shape and solid metal construction gave it more of an impact. The guard fell to the ground, and they hopped over him.

Over the hours that they had slept, the quarantine ward had emptied somewhat. There were less infected, but there were still enough there to turn the hallway into a deadly obstacle course. They ran across the foyer, just like they had discussed, stooping to pick up the discarded weapons of the overrun quarantine detail, guns that they had no idea how to use. Still, they would make better bludgeons than a chair leg or a cheap plastic keyboard.

Clara liked the feel of the metal in her hand. Its weight was reassuring. She aimed the gun at one of the infected, and pulled the trigger. Nothing happened, so she reversed the weapon and swung it like a baseball bat at a female quarantine officer, her face torn to shreds, and her biohazard suit splattered with blood that was in mid-coagulation. The impact was satisfying, the crunch loud and solid. The female quarantine officer fell to the ground, and Clara readied for another swing, but the quarantine officer didn't get up.

They moved through the double doors at the end of the hallway, Clara limping on her ankle and dodging the outreaching arms of the dead. Clara threw her shoulder into the metal bar of the door, and it flew open, the metal handle springing back into place with a loud clang. Joan followed Clara closely as they moved through the hallway, avoiding the elevators, and making their way to the stairs. The hallway was long, filled with benches and windows set into alcoves. Several of the infected stood in the hallway, and the two women swatted at them as they grasped for them. All the while, they could feel the presence of more infected behind them, slowly marching towards their position. They had to get out, or they would be trapped forever.

The hallway was stained with gore. Bloody footsteps marred the carpet, and a pile of guts sat on a bench in one of the alcoves. Clara still couldn't believe that this was happening. Only last night she had been at a punk concert with her future husband. Now he was dead, but still alive, and the world had been turned upside down while she continued to fight for her life.

Her thoughts evaporated as one of the undead reached out to her, a patient in a gown that hung down her arms. Her naked, gray body sent a wave of revulsion through Clara, and she grasped the gun in both hands, jamming the butt of the rifle into the creature's jaw and sending it sprawling. Ahead of her Joan did the same to an older gentleman with crooked glasses and an arm that had no flesh on it. Despite the use of only one good arm, it grasped at Joan, clawing at her. Joan smashed it in the face and it fell to the ground, dragging Joan down with it by her hair. The man's mouth opened wide as he pulled the struggling Joan closer.

Before he could take a bite out of Joan, Clara was there, smashing the creature in the face. It fell on its back, its nose shattered, and blood oozing out of the split skin. Clara reached down and grabbed Joan, pulling her up to her feet and shoving her forward while the old man dripped blood down a faded green, cardigan sweater.

They were halfway through the hallway. Joan looked behind her to see every creature that they had passed marching towards them, undeterred. They could ill afford any more hold-ups. Joan ran ahead, while Clara limped along behind her, her walking boot bearing some of the shock that her injured ankle felt, but it was still on fire, and her breathing was heavy. Sweat plastered her hair to her forehead as they ducked and dodged their way past the staggered handful of infected that ruled the hallway.

Then they were at the door to the stairwell. Joan pulled the door open and held it open for her. They ducked inside, and Clara did a quick scan of the landing to see if there was any way to block off the door they had just entered. There was nothing, just the stale emptiness of the concrete stairwell, the walls painted white and orange, the plain concrete steps oozing a coolness that Clara welcomed. She began her descent down the stairs, wincing as the movement sent pain from her ankle straight into her brain.

They weren't out of the woods yet. Joan ran ahead of her, looking back up at her and yelling, "Hurry up!" Clara was going as fast as she could, hopping down the stairs on her one good leg, using the butt of the rifle as a makeshift crutch. She had reached the first landing by the time she heard the door above her pop open and the first of the infected shamble through. She saw the shadow of others, the fluorescent lights above them transforming the shadows into absurd shadow puppets against the wall.

Clara doubled her efforts. When she reached the bottom of the next set of stairs, she heard a large clatter above her. When she looked, she saw them tumbling down the stairs, their arms outstretched before them. The old man in the cardigan was there, as was the naked gray woman, her hospital gown lost in her pursuit of fresh flesh. Clara was moving as quick as she could, but it wasn't fast enough. Behind her, she could hear them, getting closer, tumbling over each other as if they were waves in the ocean. They didn't care about stairs. They didn't care about falling. Clara couldn't compete with that. At the third landing, she felt and heard them close behind her, so close that she was afraid to look over her shoulder.

Clara did the only thing that she could. She rested her bottom on the railing with the intent of sliding down it. She lost a handful of hair as one of the infected reached out to her just as she began her descent. The force threw her off balance, and she slipped off the railing, rolling down the flight of stairs to another landing. When she stood up, they were tumbling after her, broken limbs and gore flying everywhere. She had lost her rifle in the fall, and the wave of infected crashed over her, their hands grasping, squeezing, clawing at her, and threatening to pull her under. She was dead. This was how it was going to end, knee deep in a pile of cannibals.

Then Joan was there, sweat covering her body, swinging her scavenged rifle at the infected. Clara broke away from the mass, their clammy hands clawing at her jeans, and slid down the next handrail. Joan followed after her, bounding down the stairs, two and three at a time.

"C'mon, girl. It isn't time to die yet," Joan said. It was a stupid thing to say. It was an action movie thing to say, but it infused Clara with energy, forcing her to push herself. She hobbled and slid down another railing, and she was about to continue to the next when Joan put her hand on her chest. "Listen," she said.

In addition to the moaning and groaning from above, below them was a buzzing sound, like the sound of a mass of people talking. Clara leaned over the railing and looked down below. The bottom of the stairwell was full of the infected, milling about, groaning and bumping into each other, spinning off in a new direction only to bump, spin, and continue the process. There would be no escape at the bottom of the stairwell.

They hurried down the next flight of stairs, careful not to alert the horde below to their presence. Joan reached the door to the second floor and pulled it open. The entire hospital was dead. They had yet to see a living person, and now their way out was blocked by a mass of infected that was too thick to walk through.

Clara hobbled through the door that Joan held open for her. The door closed behind them, and they were off through the second floor of the hospital, looking out the windows to see if there was any way down.

The second floor was different from the rest of the hospital. It contained the cafeteria, a chapel, and numerous waiting rooms filled with threadbare couches and chairs that had seen better days. It was also populated with the infected, and Clara and Joan moved quickly, sticking close to the windows.

"Where are we going?" Clara asked.

"We need to get to the backside of the hospital. There's a small parking garage for the staff there. It's connected to the hospital by a covered walkway. If we cut through the cafeteria, we can get there, get in my car and get the hell out of here."

They made it through the waiting rooms just fine, only having to dodge a few lazy hands and bash a couple of heads, but they skidded to a halt at the entrance of the cafeteria. The mass that milled around in the cafeteria was far too dense for them to make it through. Clara and Joan backed away as the infected noticed their presence, and, as a single body, advanced upon them.

"Oh, shit," Clara said.

Joan turned around, and saw that the creatures they had passed in the hallway had pursued them, cutting off any sort of escape, not that there was any place in the hospital that didn't seem to have infected milling around in it. If there was such a place, they had no way of getting to it. There was only one option, the windows, large thick hunks of glass that went from floor to ceiling. Joan ran to the nearest one and began bashing on it with the butt of her rifle, she could see the ground below, a twenty-foot drop, likely onto either hard concrete or some sort of landscaping that was likely to impale them. She was fine with either option; it was better than being torn to shreds.

Clara was there next to her, bashing the window with her fists. Joan could feel them closing in on her. Their moans and groans grew in intensity. She wondered if they could still salivate. She felt the first outstretched hand grasp at the back of her shirt, pulling her towards it. She spun around to deliver a blow with her rifle, when the creature's head exploded, blood, bone, and brains spraying out the side of the infected's head. It fell to the ground, and more took its place.

More gunshots followed, their sound echoing off the cold walls of the hospital. There was no time to look and see where the gunshots were coming from. The mass was too thick. Clara and Joan still had to fight. As soon as one infected's head exploded in pink mist, another would step up over its body, hands outstretched. The best they could do was shove and push them back, shuffling along the wall of windows towards where the shots were coming from.

It seemed like the shooting and the shoving went on for hours. Clara's arms felt like spaghetti noodles that had been boiled for ten minutes. There wasn't much strength in them, and she could see Joan failing out of the corner of her eye, wedging her rifle between herself and the infected in front of her, leaning back, just out of arm's reach, like a bully tormenting a smaller child on a playground.

"It's clear! Run this way!" yelled a voice.

Clara risked a look. The way was mostly clear. At the end of the waiting room area, she saw people in green and brown camouflage. Some on their knees, others standing behind them, rifles aimed and firing. They stuck to the wall as they advanced, their ears ringing with gunfire. It was going to happen; they were going to escape. Tears came to Clara's eyes.

"Not that close," a tall man wearing sunglasses yelled, a five o'clock shadow blanketing his jaw. They stopped against the wall. The man looked at them, his mood a mystery due to the sunglasses. "Strip."

The command was simple. The ability to fulfill it even simpler still, but they hesitated. Where were they? In what world was it ok for a man to tell them to strip? To take off their clothes and expose themselves? This was not normal. All of these thoughts ran through Clara's head, but all she managed to say was, "What?"

The man looked at her, shouting above the gunfire, "Strip or you ain't coming with us. We've already lost too many men to people that have looked fine, only to have some hidden wound. So take your clothes off, or take your chances with them."

Clara looked over her shoulder, seeing Joan's worried face and behind her, the still moving stream of infected that were pouring out of the hospital's cafeteria. Clara also knew there were more below. If her best chance of getting out alive was to take her clothes off, then fuck it, off they came. She pulled her shirt over her head, and dropped it onto the floor. She bent over to undo the Velcro straps on her walking boot, and then she slipped that off as well. As she did, she noticed that Joan was just standing there.

"Do what they say, Joan. It's our only way out of here." Joan still hesitated. Then she lowered her voice to a whisper, "For all we know they'll be dead soon, and it won't matter if they've seen you naked."

Joan began to disrobe, quickly, with a minimal amount of sexiness. When they were both standing there, fully naked, the soldier spoke up again, "Spin."

They twirled about letting the soldier eyeball them, while the other soldiers continued firing. Clara wondered how their nightmare could get any worse.

"Alright, put your clothes back on. Is there anyone else alive in this hospital?"

Clara pulled her jeans on, balancing on her one good ankle. "Not that we've seen."

Joan spoke up, as she pulled her clothes on at a lightning pace. "But we haven't been everywhere. There could still be some trapped in the rest of the hospital."

The firing had stopped. Behind Joan and Clara was a sight that neither hoped to ever see again. The floor was littered with the dead. Some were patients, some were hospital staff, there were even a few policemen in the pile.

Behind the soldiers, the door to the stairwell burst open, and a stream of the dead poured through it, cutting off their escape and startling the soldiers at the same time.

"Move!" the soldier in the sunglasses yelled. "Martinez, get us out of here."

A tan soldier ran down the path through the middle of the waiting rooms, hopping over bodies, and put his assault rifle to his eye. He fired three shots at the thick glass windows, shattering them. The other soldiers fired into the mass, backing up in an orderly manner. Still the dead swarmed.

Martinez pulled a rope from his backpack and looked for a place to tie it off. "There's nothing to tie it to, sir!"

The soldier in the sunglasses looked at Martinez, and with ice in his voice, he said, "Then tie it around yourself."

Martinez looked at the mass of dead headed their way. He knew how much ammo he had, and he knew that the others must be in the same boat. They were running low, this could be the end of him, but he did his duty. He tied the rope around his waist, and braced himself against the lip of the wall. It was only about two inches tall, but it was enough to give Martinez something to brace against.

One of the soldiers was the first one down. He hopped on the rope, and slid from view, Martinez' black combat boots braced against the wall, the tendons in his neck tight and bulging from supporting the soldier's weight.

"You two are next," the man with the glasses said.

Joan let Clara go first. She grabbed the rope in her hands and backed out into the air. Her arms were already tired from shoving away the infected, and climbing down the rope put even more strain on them. She was halfway down when her strength gave out. She slid uncontrolled for the last ten feet of the descent, the rope shredding the skin of her hands with heat and friction. She screamed in pain as she thumped onto the ground, her ankle taking the brunt of the fall. "Clear!" a soldier yelled while he helped her up off the ground. She limped to the side, her hands balled into fists and stinging.

She looked around her to see that they were not alone. Though the mass of infected were not nearly as concentrated as in the hospital, their presence was still felt. Even now, they homed in on their position. Joan was the next one down. She had no problem lowering herself down the rope, and Clara envied her with her unsprained ankle and her hands that still had all of their flesh. Two more soldiers slid down the rope, their gloves preventing them from sustaining the same injuries as Clara.

Clara looked up to see Martinez standing at the window, shadows converging on him from the darkness inside the building. He fell to his chest and swiveled his legs into the air, before shoving his whole body out the window. He hung by his hands, and then he dropped to the ground, smashing into the concrete, the rope still tied about his waist. He screamed in pain as he hit, and the other soldiers snatched him up off the ground and headed straight to a green military vehicle. It was tall, and Clara needed a boost to get into the back of the massive vehicle. She felt the soldiers shoving at her hindquarters as they lifted her up. She was too tired to feel anything but relief for the hands on her backside. She collapsed on one of the metal benches. The soldiers worked together to lift Martinez into the back of the truck, and the soldier in the sunglasses was the last one in.

He sat at the edge of the truck, and pulled a pack of cigarettes from his breast pocket. He offered one to the groaning Martinez, who had blood pooling on the leg of his trousers. Martinez took one from the package with a shaky hand, and the man with the sunglasses lit it for him with a plain, stainless steel Zippo. He pulled one out of the pack for himself.

"Can I have one of those?" Clara asked.

"Me too," added Joan.

As they drove away smoking, Clara caught sight of the window they had escaped from. The dead poured out of it onto the concrete below, rising to follow after the truck. Clara took a deep breath from the cigarette. Menthols... it figures, she thought.

Chapter 5: A Numbers Game

"Wake up, motherfucker! Time to go to school!" It was his father's voice, yelling at him, the slurred voice sounding almost playful.

"Get the fuck up!" The voice changed, the way only an alcoholic's voice can. He just wanted to sleep. He just wanted to close his ears, his eyes, and his mind and let him go away. But that's not how alcoholics work. Even if he gave him what he wanted, he would probably be offended by that.

He sat up, his head filled with cotton, and he opened his eyes to find that his father was not there. Instead, sitting across from him was the man he had met the previous night, the man that had gunned down three of the monsters and prevented Mort from overdosing on Ambien. The nightmare of the previous day caught up to him, through his foggy mind, and he closed his eyes.

"Don't do that, man," his savior said. "Don't go back to sleep. Plenty of time to sleep when you're dead, and that'll be soon enough if we don't move our asses out of here."

Shushing the call of oblivion, Mort opened his eyes back up. He was lying on a respectable couch, newish, but not so new that Mort felt bad for sleeping on it with his homeless dirt and dust. He ran his brown hands over the velvety brown couch, sharp angles, cushions without holes; it was probably the best bed that Mort had slept on in a year or two. He sat up, and tried to rise from the couch, but he fell back, gasping in pain. His knee was swollen, and as the fog of the pills wore off, he held his leg out straight in front of himself and pulled up the leg of his jeans. His left knee was monstrous-looking, twice the size of what it usually was. The cop had really done a number on it. The cuts and scrapes on his body were nothing compared to the heat and pain radiating from the swollen hunk of flesh that was supposed to be his knee. It looked like the knee of an elephant.

The man across from him saw the shape his knee was in, and he got up out of his chair. He returned with an ice pack in a towel, and handed it to Mort. "This ought to help," he said in a twangy voice. It reminded Mort of Texas. He had spent some time down there decades ago. It was a brutal experience, living free, alternating between blistering heat and downpours of rain that soaked everything to the bone.

"Thank you," he said.

"You might wanna save that thanks for later, when we actually get out of here."

"What do you mean?"

The man looked at him. He had hollows around his eyes. They were deep-set, but a vivid  twinkling blue that Mort could only describe as sniper's eyes. They seemed to see right through him. His square, narrow jaw was covered in stubble, and he moved easily, his cowboy boots seeming to be an extension of his feet rather than clunky things that were meant only for a straw-covered floor at a barn party. The big, brass belt buckle spoke of American glory, the eagle's claws clutching a bundle of arrows. "How much do you know?" the man asked him.

"I don't know much about nothing," Mort told him. "I'm not sure that I haven't lost my mind at the moment."

The cowboy squatted across from him, and stared him in the eyes, those sniper's eyes locking him in. "The world is fucked. We've got to get out of this place. That shit you saw last night? That shit that you can't believe? That was just the beginning. This thing is everywhere."

"Everywhere?" Mort said, barely able to believe what he was hearing.

The cowboy stood up and grabbed a paper cup off of the ancient wooden coffee table. He spit a wad of tar-filled spit into the cup, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and said, "They called in the military. They've declared martial law."

Mort felt a sudden rush of relief. "Well, then that's it. We just sit tight and wait. It will all be taken care of."

The cowboy smiled at him, white teeth with sharp canines that were yellowing near the gum line. "You'd think so, right? You'd think that America would be able to handle its shit, but think about it this way. There are around 1.5 million troops in the American armed forces. At any one time, 20% of them are overseas. That leaves 1.2  million soldiers to clean up this mess. Now, on the news, they're claiming that this epidemic, this whatever it is, is happening all over the world. That means that every city in America is going through what we went through last night. It don't matter how big the city is, people are dying and getting back up. Now, if 1.2 million troops seems like a small number to protect the entire country of America, then you'd be right. Even if they just protected the top fifty most populous cities, that means they're sending out 24,000 troops to each one of those cities... and there are hundreds and thousands of other cities and towns that aren't receiving any help. Let's say those top fifty cities are saved... then you're talking about at most one-fourth of the country's population. That means that potentially there could be two-hundred and fifty million of those things out there. Think about New York. You're sending 24,000 troops to safeguard a city of eight million... you think they can pull it off? It's a numbers game, man, and we don't have 'em."

Mort leaned back on the couch. Trying to make sense of all the data the man had spewed at him. He understood the gist, although the numbers were staggering and had stopped making sense to him soon after the man had spoke. "Well, none of that matters, does it? We're not in one of those cities that isn't getting help. We're in Portland."

"Yeah, well. Within a fifty mile radius of this place, there's three million people. Three million people who have the potential to turn into one of those things out there. For everyone one of us that dies, one of them is born. You think 24,000 troops are going to put a dent in that?"

Mort didn't like what he was hearing. What kind of world was he living in when you couldn't rely on the police or the military to protect you? Well, he was used to the police not protecting him, but the military?

The man with the sniper's eyes stalked over to the window to look outside, his boots clunking on the wooden floor. "On top of that, how many people do you think chose to report for duty when this all happened? Would you abandon your family with this shit going on? This place is a trap," he said. "Things will get better, for a time, and then it's going to get worse, and after that... it's going to get even worse, and after that, it's going to get about as bad as it can get."

"What do you mean?"

The man swung his piercing blue eyes in his direction. "Think about it. What do you do when you're in a hopeless situation?"

Mort shrugged his shoulders. The cowboy looked at him, and then seeing that Mort wasn't going to give him an answer, he said, "C'mon, man. When they see that it's hopeless, they're going to bring out the big guns."

Mort thought about all of the hopeless situations he had been trapped in last night, escaping from a cop car, using his head to bash his way out, escaping a group of the dead on a shopping cart, and finally winding up trapped in a bathroom with no way out except for the arms of the dead. He had been in the process of overdosing on sleeping pills when the cowboy had showed up... bringing out the big guns. He was going to kill himself rather than turn into one of those things. "They're going to bomb the place," he said. "Kill everyone before they can turn into more of those things."

"Bingo," the cowboy said.

"Jesus, we've got to get out of here," Mort said, his voice rising in panic. Mort stood on his leg.

"Not so fast, my hobbled friend," the cowboy said. "We've got to form a plan first."

"Wait, wait, wait. Before we start planning here, I need to know something."

The cowboy looked at him and said, "What?"

"What's your name?"

The cowboy smiled his white-toothed smile and held out his hand, "My name is Blake. Pleased to meet you."

Mort shook his hand. Blake had a strong grip, vice-like. "My name is Mort. Thanks for helping me out last night. So what sort of plan did you have in mind?"

"Step one... we need weapons."

Chapter 6: Getting Wheels

Ace stood in the street, shading his eyes from the sun. In his hand was a black, police-issue revolver. He looked at it, pondering his course of action. His band of freed prisoners had mostly dwindled once they escaped the police station. Some left for home, some were put off by the weird ways of Ace himself, and some had actually died. There had been nineteen men. Including Ace, five were left. They were mean men, much bigger than Ace himself, but he had something they didn't have. He had charisma. They followed him. They did what he said. It was the way it should be.

When they broke into a Subway to make sandwiches, they had made his first without him having to tell anyone. He had eaten a six-inch sub piled high with lunch meat and a bag of chips that was more salt and oil than anything else. The meal was more than enough to fuel his 130-pound frame. As he chewed, he listened to his men talk. Worthless conversation, the mindless chit-chat that spews out of those that have empty heads.

"Did you see that one cop? 'No! Don't hit me!'" the red-bearded man said in a mocking voice.

"Baked chips are weird," the man with the shaved head said.

"I just want to find some weed," said the tan man with the teardrop tattoo.

The chubby man with the funny-looking goatee said, "I wonder if my mom is still alive."

It was all worthless chatter, just noise to fill the silence. Noise to push the fear back. Halfway through their meal, Ace heard the crunch of broken glass, the glass they had busted to enter the shop. Somewhere, a silent alarm was going off, but there was no one to watch the monitors, no one to call the cops, and no cops to come even if the call were made.

Ace swiveled in his chair to see a woman struggling through the light of the doorway. She wore a dress, a floral patterned number. She was covered in blood. Her halting, herky-jerky steps were the trademark of the dead. Ace wiped his mouth with a napkin, while the others droned on. He wondered how long it would be before the men noticed the dead apparition moving through the restaurant, the floral pattern somehow seeming classy compared to the restaurant's horrid yellow and green paint-scheme. Ace sat there, sunglasses on his face, watching.

She passed right by him, not even sparing a glance his way, drawn towards the idle and meaningless chatter of his escape-mates. She shuffled towards his men, his tools. The chubby man with the funny-looking beard jumped out of his seat when her cold hands settled around his neck. They tumbled to the ground together, and the man skittered away from the woman as she tried to rise from the ground. The other men hopped out of their seats. They picked up the stools they had been sitting on with their hands and began bashing the woman with the unwieldy weapons.

Ace watched from behind his sunglasses. He watched their faces, sick faces filled with a joy that shouldn't have existed. They liked hitting her. They liked breaking her bones with the stools. Madness twinkled in their eyes. They were animals, but they had their purposes. Ace took a sip from his soda as they stripped the dress off of the broken creature, "Just to see what she had going on," as the red-bearded man put it. Filthy creatures, Ace thought. He didn't know who was worse, the dead or the living.

The chubby man with the funny-looking beard urinated on the woman, his little penis dangling in the florescent light of the restaurant. Ace was done with his drink, so he dropped it on the ground, and hopped off of the stool. He exited the restaurant, the men following behind him like lost puppy dogs.

"Where are we going?" the man with the teardrop tattoo asked.

"We're going to get my coke," he told them. This set them into hooting and hollering. In their hands, they carried weapons, blunt machines, capable of caving in skulls and putting the dead down for good. As Ace walked through the valley of the city, the sun rose up high, the shadows shifting, illuminating the walking dead spread out before them. Ace had a gun, but he didn't need a weapon. He already had four of them, living breathing weapons, ready to do what he said when he said it.

Ace told the chubby man about the club he had played at the night before. The man knew exactly where it was, and he took the lead, Ace strolling casually along, his hands in the pockets of his leather pants, the cool metal of his handgun against the small of his back. They walked in the sunshine, feeling its June warmth spread throughout their bodies. The echo of helicopters thundered through the city, and smoke rose into the sky in every direction that Ace looked. The city was crumbling in front of his very eyes.          What a great day, he thought.

There was no plan. He just wanted to get high. What good was the end of the world without a little buzz? When they passed a convenience store, his men were obviously thinking the same thing. Though the store was obviously locked up, they found their way inside anyway. The crunch of broken glass drew the dead towards them, circling in upon their location as they looted through the store for beer and cigarettes.

Ace stood across the street in the shadows, looking like nothing more than a lifelike statue clinging to the shaded side of a tall office building. He watched them move, the dead, drawn to the noise coming from inside the store. There were so many of them. Where had they all come from? Then there was more noise. From somewhere he heard an engine; it sounded distant, but in the dead alleys of the city, it was hard to tell. As it turns out, it wasn't as far off as he thought. When his men came stumbling out of the convenience store, their arms full of beer, cigarettes, and snacks that could only barely be categorized as food, a military jeep swerved around the corner and screeched to a halt in front of the men.

He watched as his men threw down their purloined goods, the man with the teardrop tattoo going so far as to put his hands on his head. A bullhorn clicked to life, and the man in the jeep said, "Stop right there. Put your hands on your head. The city is under martial law."

His men froze. The driver stayed put while the other soldiers hopped out of the jeep and headed over to the men, their guns at the ready. They made one crucial mistake. They failed to notice Ace standing in the shadows across from the store, perhaps mistaking him for one of the dead. He watched as the man in the jeep took aim down the street, his focus drawn elsewhere as the dead closed in around them. There wasn't much time.

Ace pulled the cold chunk of metal from the back of his pants, and stalked toward the driver. He assessed the situation, calmly, coldly. Three soldiers. Nine bullets in the handgun. It was doable, but he would have to be fast. He kept his eyes on the man in the driver seat of the jeep. He never even heard Ace approach. Ace pulled the trigger, and the man slumped forward, blood splattered on the inside of the jeep's windshield. With no hesitation, Ace turned to his right, locking in on the soldiers, whose reactions were somewhat slower than he would have expected. He was able to line up his second shot, and he shot the second soldier in the shoulder. He fell to the ground, as the third soldier spun and peppered the side of the jeep with bullets. It was too late though. Ace had already ducked behind the jeep, smiling, his back pressed up against the cool metal.

The third soldier never had a chance. He was stuck between a rock and a hard place, the rock being Ace and his handgun, the hard place being the four criminals behind him, brutal, unforgiving criminals who had no intention of having their wonderland torn away from them and sealed behind the cold iron bars of a cell. As soon as the soldier turned his back and fired, Ace's men tackled the soldier, hauling him to the ground, and wrestling the rifle out of his hands. They kicked him and stomped him, just to let him know how displeased they were with the interruption of their revels.

Ace rose from behind the jeep, dusted off his leather jacket and walked over to the man, who was lying facedown on the ground, the red-bearded man's knee in the soldier's back. Ace twirled the gun in his hand and squatted down in front of the soldier.

"What do you want us to do with him?" the red-bearded man said.

Ace smiled at the soldier on the ground, a predatory, unfriendly smile, and said, "Take his weapons. Take all their weapons. Put a bullet in his knee, and let him see if he can survive."

They did what he said, just as he had done with the cop in the police station. By the time they had thrown their beer, snacks, and cigarettes into the back of the jeep, the soldier was hopelessly surrounded by the dead, as were they, but they had a jeep... the soldier merely had a limp and the breath in his lungs. They drove away, pressing through the dead, smashing in the faces of the one's that got too close with the butts of their stolen rifles. Over the noise of the roaring jeep engine, they could hear the man scream.

Ace hummed a tune from his childhood as the man with the shaved head drove them to their destination. A helicopter flew over head and fired a rocket into the distance. There was an explosion. Explosions are cool, he thought.

Chapter 7: Fortified

Lieutenant General McCutcheon sat in the cab of a Hitachi gantry crane sitting on the edge of the Port of Portland's Terminal 2. The terminal sat on the edge of the Willamette River, some three and a half miles south of the St. John's Bridge, a beautiful green steel suspension bridge that spanned the river. Of course, this was not the direction that Lieutenant General McCutcheon was looking. He was looking further south, at the tops of the buildings that were on fire a mile and a half away to the south.

Below him, the bulk of an army corps was working at fortifying the terminal, 52 acres of parking lots, abandoned shipping containers with nowhere to go, and 30,000 men under his command. He had not yet been promoted to a four-star general, but he could feel the promotion coming. The body of the previous general that had been in charge of the city's defense lay smoldering in one of the burning skyscrapers in downtown Portland. At least he hoped that was the case. It could very well be walking about by now. Such were the risks of working in the army.

McCutcheon cast his gaze to the west, eyeing the opposite side of the river. He could see bodies moving. Whether or not they were dead was of no consequence to him. Right now, his only concern was fortifying his position and the city's deep waterways, dredged to make the city one of the most impressive inland ports the country had. It was their lifeline. With the port in their hands, they had access to supplies. They had access to the Navy's resources, they had reliable runways, but most importantly they had a means of escape.

He looked down at the binoculars in his hands, strong hands, capable hands, and he put them to his eyes. On the opposite side of the river, he watched as a young boy ran, shambling forms chasing after him in the sunlight. He heard the brief pop of a rifle, and watched as the head of one of the creature's turned into a red mist.

On top of warehouse #206, one of the snipers under his command was doing his best to help out. Considering the opposite side of the river must have been at least 2,500 feet away, he was doing a heck of a job. The boy ran, his blonde bowl cut bouncing with each awkward step. The boy tripped on a rock, the way young people do. There was another pop from warehouse #206, and another puff of pink mist. This time one of the dead's arms fell off. But it wasn't enough to buy the boy a reprieve. McCutcheon lowered his binoculars and ran one of his strong, capable hands over his face. Smooth shaven and grim, he let the binoculars dangle on the cord that was hanging around his neck.

"Jesus. Just... Jesus."

McCutcheon climbed down the ladders and landings that would get him back on the ground. At the bottom, in the long shadow of the crane, he met Colonel Tejada, a thick squatty man with brown skin, and arms like woven steel cables. "Any word from the men that checked out the hospital?"

Colonel Tejada saluted McCutcheon before he spoke. "The hospital is lost, sir. They said it was overrun. They only found two survivors, a doctor and a patient, sir."

McCutcheon scrubbed his hand over his face. "Any casualties?"

"One injury, sir."

They walked across the black tar of the port headed for warehouse #206, a massive building that was mostly pillars and recently unpacked communications equipment. Cheap army desks and tables could not fill the hollow feeling of the warehouse. They entered the building, going over the particulars of this particular occupation, as unlikely an occupation as Lietuenant General McCutcheon could have ever imagined. He sat at his plain desk, its cheap, faux wood surface covered in piles of manila folders.

"What about the police?" McCutcheon asked. "Have we heard anything from the local authorities?"

"Sir, we've been able to make contact with some of the suburban police. They sound like they're holding on by a thread. As far as Portland goes, we know the East Precinct has suffered heavy casualties. It sounds as if they've barricaded themselves in their police station. The North Precinct is totally lost, and we haven't heard back from the men that we sent to the Downtown Precinct, sir."

"Well this sounds like quite a shitstorm. Send a squad out to the downtown precinct. Maybe our men got into some trouble. Have them look for the missing squad along the way. Send some men to the East Precinct as well. Get those police out of there. Get them home."

The Lieutenant General eased himself into a deceptively comfortable chair. "How are our boys in the air doing?"

"They've reconnoitered all of the major highways. All major arteries into and out of the city are clogged with stalled cars and the infected, sir."

McCutcheon didn't like the sound of that. There was no way into or out of the city except by air, by ship, or by foot... and you'd have a greater chance of getting your foot gnawed off than making it out alive. He rocked back and forth in his chair. As an afterthought, he asked, "How are the rescue stations coming along?"

"Preparations are ongoing. The Memorial Coliseum is being fortified as we speak, sir. We've run into some trouble at the soccer stadium."

"What kind of trouble, Sergeant?"

"The Annies plowed through the gates on the east end of the field. We lost quite a few men, sir."

"How many?"

"Five hundred, give or take a hundred."

McCutcheon ran a hand over his face. Five-hundred dead, maybe more. Missing squads all over the place. The operation was not starting out well."

"Any refugees, yet?"

"Some are trickling in, but there are more reports of the dead than the living, sir."

McCutcheon dismissed Sergeant Tejada, and the stocky man walked away. He leaned back in his uncomfortable chair and put his hands behind his head. He put his boots on the desk, thinking.

3 million people... there were three million people within fifty miles of where he sat. How many of them had turned into the dead? How many of them had gotten up off the ground after being attacked, and started a quest for living flesh? McCutcheon still found it hard to believe that this was all real. He was deployed on American soil, not to defend it, but to exterminate the very people he had sworn to protect.

Things were bad all over. In New York, the army was fighting a losing battle. The sickness had spread, the infected rampaging through the streets. The army had sent a hundred-thousand soldiers to take on the eight million inhabitants of New York... and there were another 12 million in the metropolitan area. 3 million was a lot... 20 million, well that was impossible, even with a hundred-thousand troops. He wondered how long it would be. How long could they fight this war against the people they were supposed to defend?

McCutcheon lifted a stack of papers off of his desk. He didn't want to believe the paper on top. It was a list of non-reported soldiers, mostly members of the National Guard and the reserves, but there were other names on the list, names of people who had simply gone missing. He didn't blame them. If he hadn't actively been on the base at the time, he would have been tempted to stay in Colorado to fight for his family.

McCutcheon cursed himself for listening to his wife. "A home in the city," Sheila had said, "some place to keep me busy when you're away." Now there were potentially 700,000 thousand murderers surrounding his wife and his two daughters... and he was stuck here in Portland, trying to figure out how many soldiers had been sent out to Colorado. Was it less than the 30,000 he had? Was it more? Was one of his daughters being chased down Clear Creek right now, being chased by homicidal cannibals, that, if the eggheads were correct, were actually reanimated corpses? Was there a sniper there, paving the way for her escape?

The questions kept coming. He couldn't stop them. He hadn't been able to reach his wife since last night. He had told her to leave the city. He was still kicking himself for it. Seeing how the roads in Portland looked, he had most likely sent Sheila to her death, but maybe she was out there, holing up somewhere with  his daughters, Samantha and Raina. God, he hoped she was out there.

The Lieutenant General leaned forward and put his hands over his face, to hide the tears. Goddamn this warehouse, he thought, it doesn't even have a private place to cry.

Directly above him, he heard the pop of another sniper rifle come from the roof of Warehouse #206.

Chapter 8: Boardman, Oregon

165 miles east of Portland, Colin Murphy, affectionately known as Murph to the other staff at the Boardman Power Plant, was having his lunch and listening to the radio. He pulled a hard-boiled egg wrapped in a paper towel from the paper bag sitting on the console. If the Chief saw his lunch sitting on the console, he would have his ass, or at least he would have had it in the past. Now things were different.

Over the radio, Murph listened to the stories. It sounded like the end of the world out there. At first, Murph had thought it was one of those hoaxes like that old War of the Worlds story that people always told, the one about how some residents heard the story on the radio and mistook fact for fiction, hopping in their trucks with shotguns to fight off the alien menace.

Murph tapped the egg against the edge of the console, breaking the hard shell. He laid his napkin flat over the buttons in front of him and began the process of peeling the egg.

Things were bad all over, but not in Boardman. Boardman was a small town, out of the way, populated mostly by people employed at the power plant. There had been little of the "mass hysteria" that was being portrayed over the radio. Maybe it was another one of those Y2K situations, a non-issue being blown all out of proportion by the media for ratings. Murph wouldn't put it past them. First Y2K, then that SARS shit, and now the dead coming back to life.

Murph pulled half the shell off the egg in one go. It was an omen, a good one. The egg, was part of his daily ritual, one that he had developed over the last year of working in the control room of the power plant. He could tell how his day was going to go simply by peeling his hard-boiled egg at the beginning of every shift. Today was going to be a good day. He leaned back in the chair and brought the cold, pungent egg up to his lips and took a bite. On the monitors, everything was golden. It usually was.

Working at the Boardman Power Plant wasn't for most people. For one thing, the town that they all lived in was out in the middle of nowhere. There was nothing but a few farms, a general store, and a bowling alley that seemed out of place among all of the power plant workers and their families. Half the time the lanes stood empty, the only noise issuing forth from the bar, where power plant workers, bathed in the neon light of beer signs, swilled beer and traded stories of their glorious pasts, stories about loves won and loves lost. They were mostly bullshit, but that suited Murph fine. He had experienced enough adventure as a youth, winding up on the wrong side of life, skinny, broke, and in jail. No, his new life suited him just dandy. He had a book in his bag, some monitors and lights to watch, and a simple lunch. He was stress free and without temptation in the ass-end of the Oregon high desert, just the way he liked it.

Murph set the remaining half of the egg down on the paper towel, then he pulled a couple of small plastic containers labeled "P" and "S" from the paper bag on the console. He upended them over the egg, watching the salt and pepper dot the yellow yolk. It was about as much excitement as he could stand.

He was chewing on the second half of the egg when his radio squawked to life. "Murph. Get your ass down here."

With a mouthful of egg, he reached for the radio, depressed the button, and said, "Down where, Chief?"

"Down to the cafeteria," the reply came. Murph swallowed the egg, bundled up the napkin with its discarded shell and dumped it in the trashcan for the custodial staff to deal with. This was serious. The Chief was a stickler for the rules. For him to even use a radio and not use the customary "over" call at the end of his message was enough to tell him that. The fact that he was actually having him leave his post during his shift was a further indication.

Murph looked into his brown paper bag with one last forlorn look, and then grabbed out a small Ziploc baggie of nuclear orange Doritos.

****

The tables in the cafeteria were white, and looked like they had been purchased from a high school. They were the types of tables that had benches attached, and if extra space were needed in the cafeteria, they could be folded up and rolled into the corner. But no extra space was needed that day. The Chief stood between all of the tables. Murph sat on one, wondering what exactly was going on.

"I suppose you all been listening to the news," he started.

Murph smiled. "You mean all that bullshit they been talkin' 'bout the dead coming to life?"

The Chief looked at him, dark brown eyes burning into Murph's green eyes. Murph swiped at an imaginary itch on the back of his neck, blissfully breaking eye contact with the Chief. The stocky brown foreman spoke again, "I know. I know. It all sounds made up. It sounds like it ain't real. Well, I got some news for you. It is real."

The other workers laughed nervously. Skinny Tom, covered in coal dust and grease, said, "C'mon, Chief. Stop pulling our legs."

Murph knew it was real. As soon as he said it, Murph knew that the Chief was speaking the truth. The Chief didn't have time for bullshit. He didn't play jokes. The next time he laughed would be the first.

"We got word from town. Things are going down. Things like what the radio says is happening. I called you guys in here because we have a decision to make." The Chief looked around the room, his eyes boring into each one of the men and women who were assembled.

Murph's mind wandered. He had never been very good at staying focused on someone talking. Murph imagined an army of coal marching down a conveyor belt, rough-edged raw chunks of coal, marching right into a burning inferno to be burnt at a thousand degrees. There was a connection there... something deep. Something smart, but he couldn't quite grasp it.

"You there? Murph?"

Murph was jolted out of his own mind by the Chief's deep voice. "Huh?"

"Jesus," Skinny Tom spat. "Pay attention, Murph. We ain't on no holiday."

The Chief continued where he left off, but Murph was lost now. He paid attention to his words, hoping that he would be able to glean the gist of what he had missed when he was spacing out. "Now, I know some of you got families back in the town. I can't ask you to stay here and keep the fire going for people in Portland while your own families are at risk. But I can't have all of you go. We got a job to do, and we got to do it."

Skinny Tom and a few of the other men stood up. "What are you asking us?" Skinny Tom said, a suspicious look on his face.

The Chief wiped his hands across his face. "This is hard. I know it is. And I want you to know that I am asking; I'm not telling. I need volunteers to keep the fire lit."

Skinny Tom's jaw dropped open, and to Murph he looked like one of those ventriloquist dummies without a ventriloquist at the helm. "You want us to stay here while our families are fighting for their lives? I got a daughter and a wife, man. I ain't sittin' in no power plant to keep the beer cold in Portland while my family is out there. You got a lot of nerve."

"I'll stay," Murph said. It was as if the entire room had been a balloon filled to bursting with tension, but with Murph's words, it all seemed to leak out.

The Chief walked over to him, and patted him on the shoulder with his broad hand. "Thank you, Murph."

Murph didn't know why The Chief seemed so emotional. It wasn't even the end of his shift, and he had nowhere to be anyway. Murph looked down and pulled open the Ziploc bag full of Doritos. He crunched away as the men and women around him argued over whether they should stay or not. In the end, they all decided to leave. It was only Murph and the Chief, and Murph would have left too if he had any place else to be.

Skinny Tom and the others grabbed their coats and rushed out the door, promises on their lips to return once their families were safe. Murph watched as they disappeared, keys jingling in their hands, and wondered if he would ever see them again.

Chapter 9: Rescue

Two blocks into their flight, Rudy knew he wasn't going to be able to keep up the pace. His weight was too much; even walking exerted a massive strain on the frame of his body. Usually, when he moved about, he walked at a leisurely pace, one that would keep him from wheezing and sweating too much. He would always sweat. Three-hundred pound men sweat when they rolled over in bed.

Chloe set the pace while Amanda clung to his side. If it wasn't for the adrenaline coursing through his veins and the hungry eyes that were locked onto him, he would have sat down on the curb to cry. But he could feel the eyes and see the dead honing in on him. He didn't want to be eaten. It was a shocking thing to think. If he had told the idea casually to someone a few days ago, they would have looked at him like he was crazy. But that was his situation, he either needed to move his bulk and carry it through the city, or he could sit on the ground and be eaten. So he lengthened his stride and swallowed his pride, panting heavily to keep up with Chloe.

At least the view was nice. Chloe was dressed in a nice pair of form-fitting jeans, her platinum blonde hair catching the sunlight underneath the trees. They walked through the Park Blocks, a strip of blocks situated between 9th and 8th Ave, or SW Park Ave as some clever planner had decided to call the streets. Why that person couldn't figure out two different names to call the streets was a mystery for the ages. The Park Blocks were a twelve-block stretch through the city. So far they had traversed three of them.

The dead were everywhere, which was alarming. Rudy looked longingly at the buildings around them, any one of them perfect for hiding out in, but Chloe walked, as if driven, her rear end jiggling slightly with each step. Sweat dripped into Rudy's eye.

"Where are we going?" he asked.

Without even looking over her shoulder, "We need to find help. We need to find others, and we're not going to find them here."

"Shouldn't we get a car or something?"

Chloe laughed, throwing her head back. "Didn't you guys listen to the radio?"

"I don't listen to the radio. It's just hipster crap and forgettable pop songs," Amanda said.

"Well, you should try it sometime. If you had listened to the radio, you would know that all of the roads out of here are fucked."

Rudy wheezed as he spoke, trying to alternate breathing with speaking, "What do you mean?"

"While we were hiding in our apartments, people were trying to get out of the city. They created a traffic jam that locked up the highways... apparently the highways are worse than the actual city," Chloe said.

Rudy took this knowledge in. No way out, no escape. A helicopter roared overhead. Rudy looked up and watched it fly through the air. The sound of a minigun firing hit his ears. "Yeah!" he yelled. "Kick some ass!"

His voice echoed through the Park Blocks as the helicopter moved out of sight behind some tall buildings. Rudy wheezed and pulled his asthma inhaler from his pocket. He put it to his lips and pressed down on the canister, but nothing happened. He pressed it down one more time, but again, nothing happened. Panic welled inside his chest.

"It's not working," he whined, his chest tightening with each breath.

The creatures around them seemed closer than ever. Amanda steadied him as his face turned red. Chloe looked at Rudy with annoyance on her face.

"Come on, there's a Walgreen's a few blocks down," she said.

Rudy walked with Amanda supporting him as he struggled for breath. Fear danced around the edge of his mind. He didn't want to be eaten. The thought ran through his head over and over. The blocks, which were half the size of your average city block thanks to the ingenious planning of the city's founders, seemed to go on for miles. Rudy's throat was getting tighter and tighter, and he could barely walk.

His vision became spotty, and at one point Chloe walked back to him and snatched the sword from his hand. The dead were gaining ground on them. Their pace was no longer quick enough to avoid them.

"Hurry up or I'm going to leave your ass," Chloe spat.

Amanda whispered into his ear, her breath hot and comforting, "I really hate that, bitch."

Rudy didn't have the breath to respond. He focused on Chloe's backside, following it as the vision around the edge of his eyes darkened and spots swam in front of him. He watched, gasping for air, as Chloe swung the blade at a limping man, his stomach torn apart and guts trailing between his legs. His head rolled off, and the body slumped to the ground.

Amanda and Rudy had to skirt around it, as Rudy no longer had the strength to lift his legs more than an inch or two off the ground. Then they were there, in front of a plain storefront, plastered in the white and red logo of Walgreen's. Rudy focused on the swooping script. The glass to the front of the store was already busted, and they shuffled inside, well aware that they had gathered a crowd of followers.

Chloe ran through the store, jumping over displays that had been knocked to the ground. Rudy and Amanda followed at a slower pace, losing sight of Chloe's bobbing platinum hair. They heard Chloe banging on something, and then there was a gunshot, followed quickly by another gunshot.

"Oh shit," Amanda said. Rudy would have agreed with her if he could speak, but his face was red and it felt like a sumo wrestler was sitting on his chest, preventing him from grabbing a full breath. Even sliding his feet along was too much for him. They heard the broken glass being crunched and kicked by shambling feet behind them. Rudy forced his body to move, and they emerged into the back of the store where the pharmacy was.

Chloe was behind the counter, rummaging around, picking up boxes, reading them, and tossing them on the ground. "I can't find it. What am I looking for?"

"Ass..." he gasped, unable to form the words. "Asthalin." Rudy collapsed onto the ground behind the busted door of the pharmacy. Amanda stepped over his body and began searching the pharmacy shelves, looking for something that said Asthalin. Chloe shoved the door closed and sat Rudy against the door.

"Don't let anyone in," she said, a serious look on her face.

From his spot on the floor, Rudy could see through the wire meshed windows of the pharmacy's counter. Underneath the noise created by Chloe and Amanda's discarding of boxes, he could hear their moans and their shuffling footsteps as they got closer. Even if they managed to find his medication, they would be trapped in the pharmacy. He had likely gotten everyone killed. They could have easily left him behind. He wouldn't have blamed them. He was dead weight. Worse, he was dead weight with an asthma problem and a top speed of three miles per hour, which he could only sustain for half an hour.

Amanda was there, pulling something out of a white box. Asthalin. She held the inhaler to his mouth, and he wrapped his thick lips around the light blue inhaler, thanking Amanda with his eyes. He inhaled the medicine, and he felt the change immediately. He sat on the floor, gasping and sucking up as much air as he could as an unseen force behind him tried to push the door open. Rudy wedged his feet against the counter, and used all of his weight to keep the door closed.

His back vibrated with the banging of the dead upon the door. From his spot on the floor, he could see more of the dead banging on the glass of the pharmacy. Death was here, looking for a way to get in.

"Shit," Chloe said. "I knew I should have ditched you guys when I had the chance."

"I'm glad you didn't," Rudy said, sincerity feeling weird on the tip of his usually acid tongue.

Chloe just glared at him and began looking around the pharmacy. Amanda knelt next to Rudy. "We're going to be alright, don't worry about her. They have to get tired sometime right?"

Rudy said nothing. He concentrated on breathing, deep, even breaths. Chloe kicked the boxes on the floor as she stalked back and forth, looking out through the wire-mesh windows. She was furious. Rudy could see the rage rising in her. Her beauty melted away, replaced by an ugly creature, a hateful, spiteful thing full of anger. Suddenly, he could not see the beauty in her. Who was this woman? Who was this raging entity that stalked through the pharmacy, swearing, shouting, and knocking medications onto the floor?

When she pulled her gun from the back of her jeans, Rudy instinctively put his hands to his ears. Amanda did the same. Chloe fired through the wire-meshed window. On the other side, a man with no shirt on stopped banging on the glass. A hole in the glass lined up with the hole in his head, and his face squeaked as it slid down the glass.

Chloe didn't stop there. She fired again and again, emptying her gun into the mass on the other side of the window. When she was done, there were nine holes in the window, and several of the creatures were on the floor. But still there were more of them. Rudy removed his hands from his ears and asked, "Are you satisfied?"

Chloe shot him a murderous glare, but before she could answer, more shots rang throughout the store, but they weren't from Chloe's gun. It hung limp at her side. "Get down!" Rudy yelled, but Chloe stood there, looking like the world's most beautiful mannequin. Shots ripped through the windows, and blood plastered the glass, making it hard to see. Amanda fell into Rudy's arms, and he squeezed her tight, jamming his legs against the counter of the pharmacy to help keep the door closed, while their ears rang from all the gunfire. It seemed to last an eternity.

When it was done, Chloe began to yell, "In here!"

Over the ringing in his head, Rudy could hear bootsteps and shouting voices. As Amanda unfurled herself from his arms, Rudy couldn't help but wish that the people outside would go away.

"You alright in there?" a male voice asked.

"Yeah. We're okay, now that you guys are here," Chloe replied.

Amanda helped Rudy to his feet, grunting at the strain. His hand lingered in hers for a second, and then it was gone, the softness still hanging on his fingertips. The door slid open behind them, and several corpses sprawled onto the floor, the non-animated kind of corpses. They were Rudy's favorite.

They shambled out of the pharmacy, Amanda handing him a couple more boxes of his Asthalin. He shoved them in his bag as the men outside told them to line up against the wall. Rudy did as he was told, along with Amanda and Chloe.

One of the men came over and took Chloe's gun from her. "Look what we've got here," the man said to another soldier.

"Search 'em," the man said. He was clearly the one in charge.

Rudy saw the soldier who had taken Chloe's gun run his hands over his body, lingering in the places that Rudy wanted to linger in. Jealousy rose in him before it was followed by a softer anger. It was a strange cocktail. When the soldier was finished, he patted down Rudy, and then Amanda. His hands lingered on her as well, and for some reason, Rudy found himself equally enraged, if not more so.

"They're clean," the soldier announced, smiling slyly at the other soldiers.

The man in charge spoke with a plain voice. "Don't you know you people are supposed to stay inside?"

            "Our building was going to burn down around us," Rudy started before the man in charge cut him off.

"Looting is a capital offense during martial law." He squatted on the ground and picked up Rudy's backpack. He unzipped it and pulled out the plain white boxes that contained his medications. He held the offending items up.

"I was going to die," he complained. "The glass was already broken."

The soldier put the medicine back in the bag, zipped it up, and tossed it at his feet. "Yeah, desperate times and all that. The fact is, you're lucky we found you. You can relax. We're not going to arrest you. In fact, you're saved."

They stopped leaning on the wall and turned around to look at their saviors. "What do you mean?" Chloe asked.

"We're setting up a rescue center. We'll take you there."

Rudy felt his heart leap in his chest. A rescue center! Some place guarded by soldiers. They were saved. No more running. No more fearing for their lives.

The soldiers surrounded them. The man in charge said, "Let's get them to the trucks," and then they made for the exits. Rudy watched as the soldiers pocketed items from the store, so Rudy did the same, grabbing a bag of chips, some exotic flavor of Cheetos. Amanda grabbed a warm six-pack of beer off of a shelf, and stuffed it into her backpack. One of the soldiers looked at her, disapproval in his eyes.

"What? I'm in college," she said, as if that would explain it all.

"Can I get my gun back?" Chloe asked as they approached the broken glass that now served as the Walgreen's main entrance.

The man in charge spun around, walking backwards, and said, "You won't need it where you're going." As he stepped out into the sun, ashy brown hands clamped around his throat, and the ghastly face of one of the dead appeared, snaking a bite out of the man's cheek before anyone could do anything.

The soldiers were slow to react, their rifle straps catching on their soldiers, panic in their movements. The man in charge attempted to push away the creature that bit him, but another appeared, sinking its teeth into the meat of his arm. He screamed, and gunshots rang out in the hot air of the day. The first creature went down in a heap, and the man in charge pushed the second one to the ground, cursing under his breath. It was a little girl, her dress covered in blood that had dried brown. She looked up at the man in charge, and she snarled at him, bits of his flesh caught in her braces.

The girl rose to her feet, hungry for more. The soldiers didn't know what to do. They were waiting for a command from the man in charge, but he gave none. He seemed confused, content with looking at the blood that ran down his arm. He dabbed at the bite on his cheek, wincing in pain.

The girl reached her arms out to him, and the man in charge shoved her away, almost without thinking. Chloe was the first to speak, "Shoot it," she said. Rudy looked at the faces of the soldiers around him, young men, not much older than himself. They looked at each other, wondering which one of them was made of tough enough stuff to gun down a little girl in the streets of Portland.

"Gimme a gun. I'll do it," Chloe said.

Amazingly enough, one of the soldiers handed his rifle to her. She looked down the sight of the gun, lined up her shot and squeezed the trigger. She handed the rifle back to the man who had lent it to her.

The soldiers ushered Rudy and the girls to the trucks. Already a crowd had gathered around them. The soldiers dragged the man in charge after them. "You ok?" one of the men asked him.

"Yeah. Yeah, I'm alright. Just stings a little."

They climbed up into the back of the truck, a large two-ton beast that guzzled diesel and looked like a mechanical ancestor of the covered wagons that so many had used to emigrate and make their lives in Oregon over a hundred and fifty years ago.

They sat on the metal benches that lined the sides of the truck. The man in charge leaned his head back against the tight green tarp of the truck. "Send Silva up here," he bellowed. A man with sickly, yellow brown skin stood up and rushed to the man in charge. He began washing and cleaning the wounds, water mixing with blood and falling to the floor of the gurgling truck.

"Can I have my gun back now?" Chloe asked.

The man looked at her, smiled, and said once again, "You're not going to need it." Sweat gathered on his brow, and Chloe heard his stomach grumble as they bound his wounds. "Don't worry. You'll be safe," he said, before coughing weakly. "Hurry, up with that bandage, Silva. I don't have all day."

Rudy and Amanda watched as the man in charge paled. Their hands were interlocked. Rudy turned to Amanda and asked, "Can I have one of those beers?"

Chapter 10: Safe

Katie had driven towards the river and into one of the more industrial parts of town. She saw few people. If they were there, they were hiding. The only signs of life she had seen had been other cars passing on side roads, there for an instant and then gone. Large warehouses, some seemingly as old as the city itself, rose into the sky, most of them thirty or forty feet high. The views were terrible, but due to the lack of housing in the area, she could almost forget that they were in the middle of a potential apocalypse event. Her Dodge Durango purred along while the voice on the radio droned on.

A shelter, she thought. Would it be enough to keep them out? Would it be safe enough? She thought of the time she had spent in the old man's house, Fred Walker. She thought of the relentless banging, the untiring assault her dead husband and child had put on the door of Fred Walker's bedroom. That was only two of them. What would happen if there were a thousand of those things? What would happen if there were twenty-thousand? What place would be safe from that sort of attack?

A helicopter buzzed overhead, firing a rocket into the day. The explosion rattled her windows. She couldn't see what had been blown up, but she hoped the explosion had taken plenty of those things with it. She halted the vehicle at a stop sign, more out of habit than anything else. Other than the noise of the helicopters in the sky and the haze that crept through the city, it seemed like nothing more than an ordinary day in Portland. What would she be doing now if this were just a typical day in June? She'd probably be making lunch for Kevin while her husband bashed away on his laptop, trying to craft some sort of young adult fiction novel that would sell in the millions, so he could quit his job. He said he knew the formula. He said he had cracked the code. She believed him, though there was no proof that he held within his head the code to capture the hearts of millions of teenage girls.

She would probably be putting together some sort of sandwich assortment, ratcheting up the air conditioning, and fighting the temptation to open a bottle of wine. Kevin would be in his room playing video games or down the street playing street hockey with one of his many friends, dirty little things whose noses always seem to be runny. There she would be, fighting the urge to get drunk by slathering mayo on generic, grocery store bread. The new world wasn't all bad, she guessed, as she grabbed the open bottle of wine off the seat next to her and took a long slug from it. It was one of those single-serving bottles. Just enough for a good pug in the car. There was a pile of them in a shopping bag on the passenger seat.

Sometimes, in the world before, Katie would pick up a couple of them, and knock them back in the car while waiting for Kevin to finish up with soccer practice. Soccer... there was one thing she wouldn't miss. A bunch of kids running around kicking a ball for ninety minutes while over-aggressive parents rooted on little Johnny as if he were actually something special. Kevin was nothing special. She knew that. She was realistic. He probably would have grown up to be a banker or a sales rep somewhere, something average, something soul-sucking. Katie lowered the window and tossed the empty bottle out of the window. She grabbed another one and was concentrating on opening it up when a garbage truck flew by her parked car and plowed into the steel loading door of a warehouse across the street.

She managed to twist the cap off of the bottle of wine, and she knocked it back. Nothing like a little Crane Lake chardonnay, while you watched your favorite new soap opera, How the World Stopped Turning. She watched the legs of a dead thing jitter back and forth as it tried to extricate itself from between the shredded steel of the rolling door and the now destroyed van. On the back of the van was a smiling plumber in blue overalls holding a toolbox. "What are you so happy about?" she asked.

There was no answer, so she stepped on the accelerator. Memorial Coliseum was only a few miles away, but she had already gone through the easy part. Now she was entering North Portland, a vastly more populated area of the city, home to hotels, convention centers and the two big arenas in the city, the Memorial Coliseum and the place where the Blazers played. That building's name had changed so many times, that she wasn't sure what to call it anymore. For the first decades of its life, it had been called the Rose Garden... everyone still called it that, though the rights to the building had been dealt to some corporation or other. No one cared. It was still the Rose Garden, and it was far larger and more secure than the Memorial Coliseum.

She drove down Grand Ave. to get there. She was familiar with the road, due to the fact that every time Kevin made the honor roll, he would inevitably get a coupon for a free Blazers ticket. Only his ticket was free; whoever accompanied him had to pay. Most of the time, her husband would go, but she had wound up being forced to go a few times. Kevin loved the Blazers, as did seemingly every boy that grew up in Portland, and most of the girls too. Katie found them disgusting, self-involved, and sporting egos that seemed to barely fit within the confines of the Rose Garden. But she loved her son, so she went, spending exorbitant amounts of money on beers as she sat and watched Kevin root his team on, arguing every call, and cheering with every basket.

Grand Ave. was not empty. In normal times, Grand Avenue was a wide street, several lanes across that ran south to north through Portland. It was a couple blocks removed from the Oregon Convention Center, and it was lined with hotels, office buildings, and restaurants. Some sort of convention must have been going on, because many of the people she saw were wearing lanyards with credentials around their necks. They were dead, of course, stuck attending a convention for the rest of eternity. They blocked the road with their large backsides and cheap suits, blood staining their generic, button-up shirts.

As she wove through the people, she wondered what sort of convention they had been attending. They didn't look like comic book geeks or auto enthusiasts. Maybe it was a boring conference, like one of those one's that Jason sometimes attended, flying off to some boring town in Iowa or Missouri to attend a conference about teachers and teaching. Katie never understood why he even bothered;  it wasn't as if he was going to learn anything new.

She decided against a teacher conference as she dodged a plump man, his belt lashed on too tight to create the impression that he had a double gut, one above the belt and one below. His belly smacked off the side of the car and he tumbled down onto the hot pavement. There were too many men for it to have been a teacher's conference, she thought.

She swerved left and cruised down Multnomah St., ignoring the red lights. The concentration of helicopters was thicker here, and she could hear their noise through her windows and the blast of the air conditioner. She passed underneath I-5. As she zoomed under the road hanging fifty feet above her, she saw bodies falling onto the pavement behind her. Presumably, they were the dead who were lurking on the elevated highway above.

Katie crossed over the Max tracks, and skirted around the Rose Garden. The dead milled around the front of the place, the windows to the Rose Garden were smashed beyond belief, revealing a yawning black cavern. It gave her the chills, so she continued past, her Durango speeding past the outstretched arms of the dead. She hung a right on Interstate and continued around the block, circling around to the Memorial Coliseum. The dead were thick here, and she couldn't avoid bumping some of the out of the way. She had to slow down or risk damage to her vehicle. The last thing she wanted was to be trapped just yards away from the Memorial Coliseum with hundreds of the dead between her and her goal.

Somewhere in the back of her mind, she toyed with the thought of backing up and trying to find another way out, but she plowed ahead, her mind fixated on the possibility of normalcy, on the possibility of being rescued. She looked in her rearview mirror to see that the dead had closed in upon her. She accelerated forward, shoving them, moving them aside; a few fell under the wheels of her vehicle, and she bounced around in the cab of the Durango, smacking her head against the window as she rolled over their bodies. Then she saw it, a chain-link fence blocking the road. Soldiers stood on platforms behind the fence, rifles at the ready. They were firing.

Christ, she thought. How the hell am I supposed to get in there? Bodies dropped around the car, and she saw one of the soldiers pointing with a red flag to a section of the fence that had been opened for her. Soldiers stood blocking the entrance, mowing down anything that got between her car and the opening. The ride to the opening was awful. Her SUV jounced over the bodies on the ground. She could taste it in her mouth, the breath of freedom that the fence represented, the freedom from the world of death that surrounded her. Hope made her floor the accelerator, and her head bounced off the headrest behind her as the vehicle accelerated. A dead man stepped in front of the car, and his body went flying. Immediately, the sound of the SUV changed. Instead of the wonderful purr that she had fell in love with at the dealership, the Durango now emitted a clunky, grating noise. Steam began pouring out of the hood of the vehicle, and she could barely see five feet in front of her.

Katie skidded to a halt, just in time to avoid running over two soldiers who had their hands out in a halt gesture. The steam billowed from the vehicle, but she didn't care. She was alive. She was safe. Katie unfastened her seatbelt, and popped out of the driver's side. She spun around to look behind her as the soldiers swung the gate closed, securing the gate with heavy chains and padlocks.

The dead were there almost immediately, their faces pressed up against the chain-link fence as if they could chew their way through. "Fuck you!" she screamed at them, her middle finger in the air and tears streaming from her eyes. She dropped to her knees sobbing. It was some time before she realized that she was being gripped by the arms and dragged toward the Coliseum.

She watched the faces of the dead shrink as they pulled her away. I made it. I fucking made it, she thought.  Now what?

Chapter 11: Riverside

Lou had thought it up first. The military man just went along with it. Helicopters swung through the sky, but Zeke wanted nothing to do with the military. Lou didn't know why, but he could sense that. Zeke was military; Lou would bet his soul on that fact. It was the way he carried himself, quiet, confidant, almost robotic. But there was something else going on in the man. When they had been handcuffed to the bar in the police station, Lou had been sure that the man had left him for dead, all hell breaking loose around him, people dying, coming back to life, and then eating each other. When Zeke had slipped his handcuff and walked out of the station, Lou had thought he was dead. The cold look in his eyes as he walked away was enough to tell him that. But then he had been there, kicking at the wall with him as things in the police station became even more desperate. He owed Zeke.

So he had come up with a plan, a way to get out of the city. The world's oldest highway ran right through the heart of town, and all they needed was a boat to take advantage of it. They ran towards the river after their escape from the apartment. The dead stumbled after them. They had their guns in their hands as the afternoon sun beat down upon them. It was the middle of the day and it was hot.

The four blocks down to the riverfront had been essentially danger free. The dead were about, but they ran hard past them every time they appeared between themselves and their goal, a boat, a ticket out of town. Maybe things were shitty everywhere, but at least on a boat, they could get away from the thousands of dead that littered the city's streets... unless they could swim. Lou didn't want to think about that.

They reached the green strip of grass on the west bank of the Willamette River. It was a wide open space, which suited Lou just fine. He had experienced enough of the dead popping out around corners, arms clawing at air as they attempted to take bites out of his flesh. This was much better. Nice green grass, water to your left, and the ability to see any threat that could come at you. It was, in fact, a walk in the park.

Lou gripped his gun tight and tried to keep from counting the dead that were spread out on Portland's front lawn. That's how Lou thought of Waterfront Park. Up ahead of them, the Burnside Bridge loomed above them. Lou could see shapes at the top of the bridge, looking down at them and flailing their arms.

"Heads up," Lou said to Zeke as the bodies began tumbling over the railing and onto the grass below. Some of them fell and stopped moving, others rose, and came after them. They saved their bullets, choosing to run instead, looking downriver to see if they could see anything that could be considered a boat.

They ran under the shadow of the bridge, and when they emerged into the sun, there was more sound behind them as more of the dead fell to the soft grass behind them. It was a long fall, maybe thirty or forty feet, but the dead didn't care. They could break arms, legs, even backs and keep coming. A surprising number of them seemed to function perfectly, even with their ribs sticking out of their chests. They were like drunks in a car accident, Lou mused. Too far gone to think to brace themselves, they tumbled loosely to the ground and stood up.

"We're building quite a following," Lou said.

"I always wanted to be famous," Zeke said, smiling. It was the first bit of humor that he had heard from the man. It eased a lot of the apprehension that Lou felt about the man. He was capable, cold-blooded, but there was a human in there somewhere. Two miles south, Lou spotted what he was looking for, the furled sails of boats at dock. They sat on the river, looking like toys in the distance. Lou wanted to be on one; he wanted to feel the wind running over his bald head.

The park ran parallel with the river, the city's buildings reaching into the sky to their right. From among the tall structures to their right, Lou watched as a family burst onto the green grass of the park. They were a good quarter-mile ahead of Lou and Zeke. The father ran with a young daughter held in his arms. His beard was reddish-brown in the sunlight, and his pale legs flashed with lean muscle where his khaki shorts ended. The mother was in a dress, holding it in her hands, as she dragged along a teenage daughter. The dead poured out of the city chasing them. They reminded him of a sluggish comet tail, their excited bodies shambling after the family. The family had no weapons, and it looked like they had just made their own personal trip through hell.

"Oh, shit," Zeke said. Their path had become significantly more difficult thanks to the family and the creatures pursuing them. Lou looked over his shoulder at their own comet tail. It seemed as if nothing would ever be easy again.

Between ragged breaths, Lou said, "We gotta get past those people, man. If we get caught between their tail and the one we have following us, we're dead meat."

Zeke looked at him and then looked over his shoulder. He saw the sense in Lou's words, and without speaking, they picked up their pace to a quick jog, not fast enough to tire them out, but quick enough to let them overtake the family. Lou kept his eyes on the family as they moved, trying to keep sight of them through the mass of the dead that followed on their heels.

Lou felt the impact of each step in his knees. It had been a while since he had done so much running, first from the police station where he had almost dies and now from a horde of the dead that were locked in on them. The sun beamed down on his head, and he reached up to wipe away the sweat that collected and hung in drops on the fine black hairs of his eyebrows.

He watched as the family ran underneath the Morrison Bridge. A new problem presented itself. The dead began tumbling over the sides. Unlike the Burnside Bridge, the Morrison Bridge was built lower. It was still a twenty-foot fall, but those ten-feet less made a difference. Most, if not all of the dead that tumbled over the side of the Morrison Bridge got back to their feet after smacking into the soft green grass. As the family ran through the decrepit basketball courts under the bridge, they emerged on the other side into the sunlight, and another wave of the dead fell off the bridge, crashing into the ground.

There was now an army of rotting dead between Lou and Zeke's destination. Lou watched as the red-bearded father tumbled to the ground, spilling his young daughter onto the hard pavement. They scrambled to get to their feet, but there was nothing that could be done.  Lou couldn't hear their shrieks over the moaning, but he knew that they were screaming. Lou didn't know why he did it, but he held his gun into the air and pulled the trigger. The gunshot rang out through the city, echoing off the tall building to the west and the river water to the east.

For the first time in his meaningless life, Lou had an audience. He also had stage fright. Hundreds of the dead turned and headed in their direction, temporarily forgetting the family frantically trying to gain their feet. Lou felt good about it. He was likely to die because of it, but the family had enough of a reprieve to collect themselves and continue their flight. It felt good in his chest.

Zeke tapped him on the arm as he ran by and said, "Dumbass."

Lou didn't care. Zeke's words weren't said in a mean way. They were said in a way that implied that all he had done was make their life harder. They turned right and headed for the shelter of the city, sprinting across the green grass of the waterfront, breathing hard, the two tails coming together to form one. Lou didn't know how much further he could run, but Zeke looked like he could run all day. Sweat covered his white T-shirt, but his breathing was much easier than it had been yesterday when they were pounding on the brass bar together in the police station. It was like he was made for this shit. Lou wiped more sweat off his brow before it could fall into his eyes, stinging them.

They cut through the city, waiting for the crowd of shambling dead to follow them. Where had they all come from? How had the city fallen so quick, so fast? His mind had no time to wander. His legs burned. He had run maybe three-quarters of a mile, but it was enough. "Hold up," he said, bending over and gripping his knees.

Zeke slowed down, breathing just as hard as Lou. He put his hands over his head and said, "Not like that. Like this. Bending over makes your body work harder to get oxygen."

They walked slowly, the scattered dead of the city gaining ground on them. All Lou needed was a few minutes. He stood and put his hands on his head, though all he really wanted to do was double over and fall to the ground. He cursed the heavy, khaki boots on his feet. They were fashionable; the ladies seemed to like them, but damn did they get heavy quick when he was running.

They walked casually, their hands over their heads, the dead drawing closer and closer. "What's it like to be a hero?" Zeke asked.

"I don't know. You tell me. You're the army boy."

Zeke nodded at him, not surprised that Lou had accurately pinpointed his past profession. "Yeah, well, even in the military, I never called down the wrath of a couple hundred cannibals just to save one family."

"You would have done the same," Lou said. Zeke shook his head in the negative, but Lou could see it in his eyes. He could see the hero inside of him. Zeke didn't know it was there, and perhaps he even believed he didn't have it in himself, but Lou could feel it.

"Come on. Let's cut across," Zeke said. They turned left and headed south down 3rd Ave., a dingy sort of street filled with bars and shithole convenience stores. Lou looked longingly at the food in the stores. He could see that the glass had been busted in and the shadows of bodies milled around in their dark interiors. Lou glanced over his shoulder. He was shocked at how much ground the dead had gained. They weren't fast, but they didn't slow down. Thank God they couldn't run, he thought.

They strolled down the middle of the street until they passed the spot where the Morrison Bridge dumped out onto 3rd Ave. Then they walked one more block, keeping out of reach of the dead behind them, alternating quick bursts of light jogging with fast walking. They turned left on Morrison St, which surprisingly didn't even connect with the Morrison Bridge. Lou thought it always had, but it looked like he had been wrong. It didn't matter in the grand scheme of things, but he always hated being wrong. Ahead of them, two blocks to the east lay Waterfront Park. They had basically moved in a circle, drawing the dead behind them, and clearing the way before them at the same time.

"You ready?" Zeke asked.

"You know it," he replied, and then they broke into an easy trot, that didn't feel so easy the second time around. His footsteps were heavier, and his boots felt like iron weights hanging off of his feet, but he pushed himself like he had never pushed himself before. His life depended on it. He knew a boat and some open water would be waiting at the end of the jog. It would be worth it.

Once again, they set foot on the green grass of Waterfront Park. There were no obstructions, and the dead were scattered about, too thin to pose much of a threat. Their tail was still following, but hopefully they had lost most of them with their twists and turns. Lou looked in the distance to see if he could see the family, but all he saw was another bridge and a blob of corpses falling off its edge. With any luck they would spread out by the time they reached the dead. He looked further down, and saw the unfurled sails of the boats even closer. They couldn't be more than a third of a mile away.

They approached a fountain, the Salmon Street Springs. Lou remembered playing there as a child, while his father had sold dope to the people who milled around its edges, watching the children scream and laugh as the water doused them in the summer heat. Even in his happiest memories, his father was always up to something. Lou shoved the thought aside. Now was not the time to start feeling sorry for himself.

"Get that gun ready," Zeke said. "I think we're going to have to blast our way through the next batch."

Lou did as he was told. He ejected a clip from the handgun, shoved it in his pocket, and put in a fresh one. He would have liked to stop and reload fully, but there simply wasn't enough time. Even a minute or two could be fatal out here. For the first time in his life, Lou wished he was one of those skinny Kenyan runners that he always saw on TV. Then he could run forever. Then he would be safe.

They approached the bridge hoard and skirted around them, their guns at the ready. There was no way through, and they couldn't afford to have more dead come crashing down right on top of them. Lou could see their shadowy torsos milling around on top of the bridge. Zeke took the lead, and gunfire rang out. They had to slow their progress to make the shots count as they moved through the dead. The last thing Lou wanted to do was walk past one of the things he thought was dead only to have it latch onto him and take a bite out of his ankle.

Lou held his handgun up and at the ready, while Zeke took measured shots, walking heel to toe through the crowd. Lou's heart pumped in his chest, and he could taste the fear in his mouth.

"Out!" Zeke yelled. He ejected his spent magazine, and Lou took over, taking careful aim. The head, he thought, it's got to be the head. He squeezed the trigger, but the round simply blew through the shoulder of an old man. The old man rocked backwards, his thin-framed glasses falling off of his face and onto the ground, where he stepped on them. Lou was more careful the next time, lining up his shot, and squeezing the trigger gently. The bullet entered the bridge of the man's nose, and the exit wound sprayed blood on the dead lady behind him. The man finally went down. He took stock of who was closest, and he found a lady two feet to his right. He took aim again, and scored another hit, her body falling to the ground.

"Clear!" Zeke yelled, and Lou fell back so that Zeke could do the heavy lifting again. He was much more accurate, and they had a lot more ammunition for the machine gun. They were almost to the sunshine, when a fresh wave of the dead fell over the side of the bridge above them. Zeke went full auto with the machine gun, ripping through the bodies in front of them. "Run!" he yelled, and they did.

They sprinted as if the entire world was on their heels. The dock was within sight. All that stood between them was five-hundred feet of rocky river shore. "Fuck yeah!" Lou yelled between deep ragged breaths. The dock was there, right in front of him. He kept his eyes on the sails of the ships, willing himself to keep moving, though his legs burned, his knees ached, and his shoes felt like he was lugging hollowed out walrus carcasses on his feet. He tripped once, and tumbled to the jagged rocks where the river water lapped at their cold grey forms. He bounded to his feet, using the last reserves of his energy, and they approached the river dock. He clambered up the side of it, Zeke ahead of him. His boots rang out on the aluminum ramp that lead from the shore, then they thumped on the wooden planks of the dock.

Lou turned around, and behind him he saw his worst nightmare. Their flight through the city had created a roiling, stumbling mass. Good luck to anyone who ran afoul of that group. Lou focused back on the task at hand, "What boat are we gonna take?"

"Anyone we can. You know how to hotwire a boat?"

Lou looked at Zeke like he was crazy. Then a voice rang out over the docks. "Over here!" a man yelled. Zeke and Lou turned to see who was yelling at them. It was the red-bearded man and his family.

Zeke patted Lou on the chest and said, "Looks like being a hero pays off."

Lou could not explain the feeling that he felt then. It was a warmth that started somewhere in his heart and radiated throughout his body. But it was more than that. It was as if some long dead part of him had come back to life, some part that he had tried to destroy throughout his entire life, a life marred by mistake after stupid mistake. It was pride, something he hadn't felt in a lifetime.

His boots clunked on the wooden dock, feeling lighter than a heart full of pride. He hopped onto the boat and sat heavily. The boat was all white. A canopy covered the pilot's seat, but there was room for seven or eight people in the boat if they crammed in tight enough. The man with the red beard tried to start the boat up, but it wouldn't turn over.

"Untie the boat would, ya?" he said. Zeke hopped out of the boat, and undid the rope that secured the boat to the dock. The buzz of a thousand corpses got closer, but still the boat wouldn't start, the engine making a sickly choking noise.

"Is this thing going to start or what?" Lou said. The man's wife and children huddled in the back of the boat, a hopeful look on their face.

"It'll start. It's just been a while," the bearded-man shot back, concern creeping into his voice.

Zeke hopped back into the boat and began reloading the magazines for the machine gun. Lou took his cue from him and did the same. "Dammit!" the bearded-man yelled, before slamming on the steering wheel as Lou slid another 9mm bullet into the magazine in his hand. The clomp of the dead reverberated off the wooden boards of the dock.

"You better get that thing going, man. We don't got all day," Lou yelled before turning to the children and their mother. "You guys might want to move up front, and cover your ears." They moved dutifully, the mother prodding the children protectively. They sat in the front seat, right on top of each other, their hands over their ears.

"You ready to do this?" Lou asked Zeke.

"Whether I'm ready or not, it's the way it has to be." Zeke held his fist out to Lou, and Lou pounded it with his own fist. They took aim at the heads of the nearest of the undead column that tromped across the wooden boards.

They surged along the dock, as if they knew that their prey had nowhere to go. Their arms were held straight out before them, hands formed into claws as if they could tear their flesh apart from ten feet away. The engine gagged again, choking and grinding. No luck. The girls began screaming, and Lou fired off his first shot. The lead corpse fell into the water where it floated. Zeke put another one down, but they were moving faster now, like a snowball on its way downhill, gaining momentum the closer it got to the bottom. Lou didn't have time to think anymore. He didn't have time to measure his shots. For every two shots he fired, one of them dropped, and then they were at the edge of the dock trying to get onto the boat. His gun clicked empty, and he began swinging the pistol like a hammer, bashing the grip of the gun into the matted bloody hair of the dead. They pushed, flowing at them like an unbreakable wave, and then he heard the happiest sound of his life.

The engine sputtered to life, black smoke spurting out of the exhaust of the boat. The boat lurched forward away from the dock, and Lou threw the dead woman he was struggling with into the water. Even as she flew away from him, her arms grasped and clawed at him. When she hit the water, she sank like a rock, her arms reaching up for him. Lou vowed to never swim in the water again.

Then they were away from the dock. The line of the dead stretched down the wooden planks and the riverside for a couple hundred feet. Lou collapsed onto the hard fiberglass bench on the rear of the boat and let the river wind glide across his bald head. He closed his eyes and soaked it all up. He had never been on a boat before.

It was quiet on the boat, except for the gurgling of the engine, which sounded like nothing compared to the ear-shattering noise of gunfire in the city. Everyone was silent, as if speaking would wake them up from the dream of escaping. Lou opened his eyes. The children clung to their mother, tears leaking from their eyes. Zeke sat across from him in the back of the boat, loading bullets into his empty magazines. Lou decided it would be prudent to do the same, so he exhaled slowly, pushed the peace aside, pulled the clip out of his handgun, and reached in his pocket for ammunition.

"Thanks for getting us out of there," Lou said.

The bearded man said, "No. Thank you. If you hadn't fired that gun, they would have overrun us."

The boat bounced over the water, and Lou looked at the city passing by. He had never seen it from this angle before. The river banks were lined with shambling forms. "Where are we headed?" he asked.

"Away from here," the bearded man said. "My name is Brian. This is my wife Sarah, and my daughters Ruby and Jane. Pleased to meet you."

"I'm Lou, and this quiet guy over here is Zeke."

The wife nodded at him. Her dress was covered in blood, and a thought struck Lou. The blood, the bites, they had to be sure. "Was anyone bitten?"

The wife looked at Lou with fear in her eyes. Lou got the feeling that she was hiding something, but he didn't know about how to go about getting her to admit it. The world was dying, and here he was worrying about upsetting anyone; meanwhile, the woman across from him could be turning into one of those things in front of his very eyes, ready to eat her own children at a moment's notice.

They sped underneath a bridge, and there were a few splashes in their wake as the dead fell into the water.

"You think they'll drown?" Lou asked Zeke.

"I don't see how. They're not breathing."

Sarah spoke up then, "So you think they're actually dead?"

Zeke turned to the lady and flashed a toothy grin. "Lady, I know they're dead. As soon as you guys get that into your head, you can get about the business of dealing with it. No, they're not sick. No, they're not alive. No, they won't respond to reason. All they respond to is a bullet to the head. You reshape your reality with those parameters, and you'll be just fine."

It was a harsh wake-up call, but it was a necessary one as Lou saw it. The children clung tighter to their mother, their father glancing back at them from the corner of his eye. They cruised under another bridge, and more splashes followed them. The boat was not fast, but it moved fast enough. The dead were not masters of timing, otherwise they would have been covered in a deluge of the dead every time they passed underneath a bridge. The boat forged north, splitting the Willamette's murky waters, the sun in the sky, and the banks of the city lined with the dead. Helicopters flew above, thundering through the valley. He saw one in the distance, lighting up a stretch of freeway that hung suspended in the air. Spent shells glittered in the sun like fairy dust, and Lou imagined that he could hear them hitting the road beneath.

"You think your boys can stop this?" he asked Zeke.

"They're not my boys. Not anymore."

"Hey, guys. We've got a problem," Brian said. In front of them, boats sped toward them. Not your average coast guard boat or port authority rig. These were military class ships. Lou could see the guns on the decks. They were locked into a course that would directly impede their own progress. "Should I turn around?" Brian asked.

Zeke laughed slightly. The noise sounded like a cat learning how to speak English. "You'd never escape those. They can go about thirty five knots an hour. How fast can this thing go? Seven?"

"Eight if I push it," Brian said with a faint ring of hope.

"Yeah, well, push it or not, we won't be escaping these guys. Let's just see what they want."

Brian kept the boat on the same course. When they were about a hundred yards out, one of the ships activated their bullhorn, "Turn off the engine and prepare to be boarded." Brian did as he was told. The boat slowed immediately, bobbing on the river. Lou slid his gun into the waistband of his jeans, but there was nowhere for Zeke to put his gun, so he left it on the ground.

The boats cruised up to them, one on either side. The navy ships towered over the boat that they were in, their decks easily above the highest point of their own vehicle. Lou looked up to see guns trained on them, serious men with serious faces doing serious work.

"Are any of you bitten?" a soldier asked them. They shook their heads.

"No one is bitten," Brian yelled up to the soldier.

"Stand back," the soldier yelled as a ladder was lowered from the side of their boat onto their deck. There wasn't much room to maneuver, as the boat was packed tight with the six people that were already on it. A soldier, black hair peeking out from underneath his cap, climbed down the ladder, landing on the deck of the boat with a hefty thump. His boots were dark and heavy, as was the gun in his hand. He searched them wordlessly. He spotted the submachine gun on the deck of the boat, and he bent down, picked it up, and tossed it up to a soldier waiting on the deck.

When he was done patting down Zeke, he yelled, "Clean!" loud enough for the soldiers on the boats to hear him. Lou was next. The anti-authority part of him wanted to punch the man in the face for putting his hands on him, but he understood it. He pushed the feeling down inside, and let it burn. The soldier pulled the gun from the waistband of Lou's jeans, and tucked it into his own pants. With his gun aimed at Lou, the soldier turned to Brian and said, "Are you guys alright? Is this man holding you hostage?"

Lou couldn't believe what he was hearing. His smoldering sense of anti-authoritarianism clawed up his ribcage. Even at the end of the world, a black man couldn't catch a break. "Motherfucker, I ought to..." he started before Brian jumped in.

"No, as a matter of fact, he saved us."

Lou was still outraged, and he stared the soldier down, until he turned his head away. If this was the street, he wouldn't have had to turn his head because he would already be face down on the concrete, doubled over, with Lou's boots planted firmly in his ribs. But this wasn't the street, and the man had a gun.

"Easy, Lou," Zeke said. Lou fumed inside, but he composed himself as the soldier searched Brian.

"Clean!" the soldier yelled. He then turned to Sarah, her daughters still clinging to her. "Sorry, ma'am, but I've got to."

He reached towards Ruby to pull her away from her mother, but Sarah flinched back yelling, "You keep your hands off my babies!"

She was frantic, wild-eyed. Her voice sent shivers through Lou. It was a primal voice.

"Ma'am. I just need to see if she's bit."

"She's not bit!" Sarah yelled.

"Sarah, calm down. Just let him see. There's nothing to worry about, right?" Brian asked the soldier.

The soldier looked at him, appreciative of Brian's help. "It's just a precaution. Nothing is going to happen."

Sarah clutched Ruby tighter to her chest.

"C'mon, baby. Just let them see," Brian said. Sarah squeezed her eyes shut, and then she set her daughter on the ground.

"We've got a bite!" the soldier yelled. When Sarah had set Ruby on the ground, they could see the blood, even through the loud floral pattern of Sarah's dress. On her stomach, there was a round stain, not large, but enough to cause the soldier to back away, his rifle ready. "Ma'am, were you bit?"

Tears came to Sarah's eyes. "It was just a little scratch, when we were running." Her hands went to the fabric of her dress, covering the hole in the dress as if to hide the wound. Brian's face drooped.

"You and you," the soldier said pointing to Zeke and Lou, "get up that ladder. Take those kids with you." The girls began screaming right away. Lou picked up the littlest girl, while Zeke dragged the other one to the ladder. They fought and they kicked, but Lou knew what was going to happen next. Lou raised the little girl up, and a soldier grabbed her arms, lifting her roughly onto the deck of the navy boat. Together, Zeke and Lou hoisted the older daughter into the air, her legs kicking back and forth. Lou caught a sneaker in the lip for his trouble as she was pulled onto the deck, screaming at the top of her lungs.

They climbed the ladder. Lou looked back to see Brian holding his wife in his arms, whispering into her ear and kissing the side of her hair. Sarah's eyes were squeezed closed. Lou didn't want to see anymore. It wasn't for him to see. Zeke tapped him on the shoulder and they walked to the other side of the boat, looking out over the water. Zeke pulled a battered pack of cigarettes out of his pocket and handed one to Lou. He lit it for him, and Lou took a deep drag, blowing the smoke into the air where it was whisked away by the ever-present river wind.

From behind them, they heard a single gunshot. The girls screamed and sobbed. Lou took another drag from the cigarette, and blew more smoke into the air. This was the second boat Lou had ever been on. He hated it.

Chapter 12: Two to Drop Off

Their ride back to the refugee camp started out relatively uneventful. When Joan had finished her cigarette, coughing and complaining of being dizzy in the process, she had dropped to the ground and examined Martinez' wound. The man in the sunglasses handed Joan a knife and she sliced open the leg of his pants, exposing a nasty compound fracture. There was nothing that Joan could do at the moment, but she let them know that they would need to get where they were going pretty fast. The man in the sunglasses smiled as he accepted back his knife and said, "That's the plan."

The truck swerved and bounced through the city, avoiding the dead. Even a giant truck like the one they were riding in would break down if it rammed into too many of the dead. It was a transport vehicle; not a bulldozer. 200 pounds of limp flesh at 30 miles an hour... that was a recipe for AAA. Only, AAA didn't exist anymore.

"Thank you for your help, miss...," the man in the sunglasses said, leaving the statement open.

"Winston, Joan Winston. I'm a doctor at the hospital, or at least I used to be."

The man nodded his head. He was older than she had initially expected, somewhere in his forties. She could see silver in his hair.

"I'm sorry about the whole naked thing. We can't be too careful. Being a doctor, I'm sure you can understand that."

"Understand and like are two completely different things. But yes, I understand. And what is your name?"

The soldier removed his sunglasses and hung them on the shirt pocket of his uniform. He held out his hand. "I'm Staff Sergeant Hubert." Joan shook his hand. "What can you tell me about what happened at the hospital?"

"The place got seriously fucked. That's what happened at the hospital," Clara said, with her usual acidity.

Hubert turned his head to regard Clara, as if he hadn't noticed her. "And who are you?"

"I'm the only one of Joan's patients that's still alive."

Joan put her hand on Clara's arm. "She doesn't mean anything. We've all had a tough night." The truck swerved to a stop, and they all lurched forward on the benches, splaying their arms to help them regain their balance.

"What's going on?" Clara asked.

Staff Sergeant Hubert put on his sunglasses and exited the back of the truck. His soldiers followed him, except for Martinez who lay on the floor groaning. Clara and Joan looked at each other, and silently came to the agreement that they should take a look as well.

Clara hobbled over to the back of the truck. The soldiers were gathered around the vehicle, their faces robbed of their typical soldier stoicism, replaced by slack-jawed awe. A quarter-mile away, they could see the outline of the Memorial Coliseum. Fences ringed the stadium, pitiful things that looked as if they were hastily thrown up. Scaffolding was thrown up behind the fences, and between their truck and the fence, an army of the dead milled around.

The problem was obvious; too many of the dead were milling around the fence. Hubert was gesturing and pointing at the fence with his hand, giving the men directions. He turned around and saw them peeking out the back of truck, and he smiled at them reassuringly.

"This is not good," Clara said. "That's supposed to be the refugee camp?"

For once, Joan agreed with her. She brushed a lock of brown hair out of her face and said, "We'll be alright," more to allay her own fear than to make Clara feel better. The soldiers finished their conversation, and they climbed back into the truck. They began peeling the tarp off the back of the truck, exposing the ribs like the mammoth fossils of a dead dinosaur.

"What's the plan?" Joan asked.

Hubert smiled. "It's simple. We're going to pull up along the fence, and jump out of the back onto the scaffolding."

"You've got to be kidding me," Clara said.

"Anyone want another cigarette?" he responded. Clara raised her hand, but Joan kept hers down, chewing on her lip.

From the ground, Martinez said, "I'll take one, sir."

Hubert knelt down on one knee, "You're going to be safe in a matter of minutes, Martinez." Blood covered the floor of the truck, and Martinez' skin had paled considerably. Hubert stuck a cigarette into the man's mouth, and lit it. Hubert's Zippo did the job of lighting the cigarette, while his sure smile did the job of lighting up Martinez' face.

The men had removed the tarp, and the sun poured down on them. It had to be two or three in the afternoon, and the sun felt harsh on their skin. Joan felt sweat form on her lip. There was a breeze, but it wasn't enough to quell the heat. Hubert pounded on the cab of the truck and they moved towards the wall of the dead.

The truck bounced around, the remaining men jostling back and forth in the back of the truck, their rifles held with one hand, while their other hand grasped the exposed ribs of the truck. The noise of the massive diesel engine drew the attention of the throng in front of the Coliseum. It wasn't long before the sound of a hundred dead hands banging on the thick steel of the truck created a deafening cacophony.

A helicopter joined the fray, steaming out of the north. It tried to thin out the crowd of dead between the truck and the Coliseum, turning the infected into a pulp with guns that were meant to mow through steel and concrete. Head shots were not a sure thing with a helicopter being buffeted by the wind. Gore sprayed everywhere, the helicopter's artillery being a little bit of overkill for the soft mass of the dead. The soldiers opened fire, and over the noise of the chopper, the crack of rifles, and the hundreds of dead beating on the truck, no one noticed when the upper half of a torso flew into the back of the truck. Blown free from its legs by the powerful Gatling gun on the chopper, the torso landed right on Martinez.

No one heard his screaming, as everyone's attention was focused on the wall of the infected that was trying to beat their way into the back of the truck. They were uncoordinated but tenacious. As it inched forward through the crowd, Hubert and his men fired into their mass, missing more often than not due to the jouncing of the truck over bodies. The truck pressed forward, but the bodies were too thick, and as it approached the fence head on, the wall of creatures was pressed inward against the thin mesh wiring. It began to bow inwards, and the soldiers on top of the scaffold signaled for the truck to back up.

The driver threw it into reverse, and the truck came to a halt. One of Hubert's men was off balance, and he fell onto the floor of the truck, where the torso of the dead creature that had thoroughly devoured the throat of Martinez reached for him, grasping onto his shirt. The soldier stood up with the dead torso hanging off of him. He clawed at the creature, and this time Hubert noticed. He signaled the soldier next to him, and Clara and Joan moved as far away from the struggling soldier as possible.

The truck lurched forward, knocking the soldier with the dead torso off balance. He tumbled to the ground, and blood hit the green metal floor of the truck. Hubert took aim and shot the torso, and the bitten soldier sat up, touching his face. Blood came away on his hands and he looked at Hubert with a frightened look on his face, as his own mortality flooded his frontal lobe. Hubert pulled his sidearm and put a round through the soldier's head.

From his position on the ground, Hubert didn't see Martinez' eyes snap open. Clara did. She yelled, "Watch out!" as loud as she could, but over the noise, it was a mere murmur. Martinez managed to stand on his one good leg, and as the truck rolled over more bodies, he lost his balance and fell forward, tackling Hubert to the ground. His sunglasses slid to the tailgate of the giant truck, and when he rolled over on his back, Joan could see the terror in his eyes.

As the truck pulled parallel with the fence, Martinez took a bite out of Hubert's thigh. He screamed in pain, trying to shove him off with his left hand, while his right hand searched for the pistol that he had dropped when he fell to the ground. The two remaining soldiers had their work cut out for them, trying to keep the dead from climbing aboard.

Hubert found his gun and place it against Martinez' forehead. He pulled the trigger and blood splattered the back wall of the truck's cab where Joan and Clara were standing. The soldiers on the other side of the fence called out to them, their hands outstretched. Without thinking, Joan pushed Clara forward. Clara's hands were held out in confusion as if she didn't know what to do next. To Joan, she seemed on the verge of breaking.

The soldiers grabbed Clara's hands, yanked her out of the bed of the truck, and threw her down on the ground where more soldiers were waiting. It was a tough fall, but it was better than being dead, and the soldiers had very little time or patience at that particular moment. Joan fared better. She was more present than Clara was, and when the soldiers held out their arms to her, she gladly accepted them. Joan scrambled down the scaffolding, not wanting to be in the way. When she hit the bottom, she turned and watched as the last two soldiers made their way onto the platform.

Then she saw something amazing. Hubert stood up in the back of the truck, his sunglasses back on his face, and a cigarette in his mouth. He waved to her, smiling as if to say it was all worth it, then he put a gun to his head and blew his own brains out. His body collapsed to the back of the truck as if in slow-motion.

One of the soldiers on the scaffolding banged on the roof of the truck's cab, and it lurched away, rumbling over the dead, the driver checking his mirrors to see if he had any hangers on. How he was going to get out was a mystery to Joan, but he would figure it out.

Right now, she was more concerned with all of the guns pointed at her and Clara.

"Strip," one of the men said. Joan did so without hesitation. It was a new world, and public nudity was no longer frowned upon.

Chapter 13: The Dumpster of Salvation

Blake walked down the street, his hunting rifle in his hand. The rifle was solid, and Blake knew how to use it, but he only had one box of ammunition. Unlike most people, his rifle was actually only for hunting, and he had no need for more than one box of ammo... until he had woken up to find the world dying.

Mort followed him closely, his pistol in his hand. There were only three bullets left in it. He was saving them for a special occasion. They ran down a thinly populated street, home to low buildings, the occasional tree, and the dead. They had seen a few people scattered about, but no one appeared interested in making friends. The few cars that had passed them by had been at full rev and flew past them without even slowing down. The buildings in this part of town looked like they had been built in the '70s. They were square squat structures that had the feel of a strip mall. Narrow alleys ran behind and between each of the buildings.

They moved at a slow pace, necessitated by Mort's swollen knee. Blake knew where he was going, a pawn shop that was only a couple of blocks down the road. They had guns. They had plenty of them, but he didn't know if they would be able to get in. They were taking a chance, but if it led to them escaping from the city, then Mort was all for it, and he knew that he was going to need more than three bullets to pull off the Great Escape.

The building was nothing special, but Blake walked around it anyway, peering in the windows. No one was home it appeared. The inside of the store was dark, and the windows were unbroken. They walked down the alley that ran down the west side of the store, enjoying the shade it provided. There was a back door there, but it had no handle. Blake thought for a second before saying, "I guess we're just going to have to break into the place."

Mort shrugged his shoulders. Whatever they were going to do, he wanted to do it fast. They turned to walk out front. Blake smashed one of the unlucky dead that had followed them down the alley across the face with the butt of his rifle. It crumpled to the ground, but Blake gave it a couple more whacks. It was most definitely dead, permanently, when Blake stopped.

They stood in front of the store, a handful of the dead shuffling down the street towards them.

"Alright, here's the plan. We break in the window, and run to the rear as quick as we can. A shithole like this isn't going to have the guns out front. They'll most likely be in the back. We'll pop into the back, grab the guns, break out through the back door, and skirt around the back alley to avoid anything that comes investigating. Sound good?"

Mort nodded, "Sounds like a plan."

"Now if we break this glass and an alarm goes off, we're really going to have to move our asses."

"Right," Mort said, taking deep breaths in preparation. "I'm ready."

Blake looked at the front of the pawn shop. "4 DVD's for $10," was painted across the window in red, yellow, and black. "That's a hell of a deal," Blake said before smashing the window in with the butt of his rifle. There was no pause as the pawn shop's alarm sprang to life. It was an ear-splitting noise, so sharp and powerful that Mort could swear he felt each blast in his teeth. The alarm could probably be heard for blocks.

Blake ran through the store. He was much quicker than Mort seeing as how he hadn't destroyed his knee the night before. Blake hopped over the counter in the back of the store and then kicked in the wooden door behind the counter. Mort moved as quick as he could, which wasn't actually all that quick. He rolled over the counter and landed on the other side. When he stepped into the back room, Blake was tossing boxes of old junk on the ground. DVD's, tools, and junk jewelry all piled up on the floor. On the opposite side of the room, Mort spied a chest hidden underneath some boxes of CD's that were covered in a layer of dust.

Mort shoved the box to the side and lifted the cover of the chest. Lying in the chest was a treasure trove of guns. "Over here!" Mort yelled over the alarm.

Blake spun, the cowboy hat on his head hiding his eyes in the shadows of the pawn shop. "Hell yeah, Mort. That oughta do."

Blake playfully slapped Mort on the shoulder and then squatted next to him, pulling the guns out of the box. "No ammo. It's like havin' a Thanksgiving dinner in a can and no damn can opener."

Mort looked around the room. Everything had been checked except for an ancient, olive green filing cabinet in the corner. He limped over to it and tugged on the cabinet's top drawer. It wouldn't budge. It was locked.

Blake stood and looked out into the main part of the store. He could see the first of the dead ambling through the entrance. He pulled his hunting rifle from his shoulder, checked to see that it was loaded and the safety was off, and then he said, "Come on. Let's get out of here. We struck out."

"No, man. I'm tellin' you, the ammo is in here," Mort said as he continued bashing on the file cabinet. He could hear a clinking sound inside.

Blake held his rifle up to his eye, put the dead man's face in his sights and exhaled before squeezing the trigger. The body went down, and Blake racked another round into the chamber of his rifle. He could see the shadows of more dead moving around through the paint on the stores windows. The alarm was a dinner bell, calling the dead forward.

"Stand back," Blake yelled, taking aim at the metal lock in the top right corner of the filing cabinet. Mort dove to the ground at Blake's words, and the shot he unleashed made the alarm pale in comparison. Mort put his hands to his ears, and wondered if he would ever hear again. He shook his head, and the head-splitting screech of the pawn shop's alarm slowly switched places with the ringing in his ears. Mort walked over to the filing cabinet and pulled on the handle of the top shelf. It slid open with just a little effort. The drawer was piled high with a haphazard collection of receipts and pawn slips. Mort ran his hand through them just to be sure. There was nothing in the top drawer, so he slammed it shut. Mort flinched as Blake fired off another ear-cracking round. He pulled open the middle drawer, and it was more of the same, and a bottle of whiskey.

Mort looked at the whiskey. It seemed like a fine thing to find, but he slammed the drawer shut as another round from Blake's rifle echoed through the pawn shop. In the confines of the back room, the noise was so loud that Mort imagined that his ears might actually be bleeding from the trauma. With hope in his heart, he pulled open the final drawer, the bottom drawer, and there they were, faded boxes of ammunition, the cardboard aged with time.

Blake looked over and tossed him a bag. "Fill it up!" he yelled before taking sight and blasting another tone out of Mort's aural repertoire. Mort spread the green canvas bag wide open, and scooped the boxes out of the drawer and into the bag as quick as he could. There were six of them, and then a little something extra. Mort held the metallic-green egg shape up to his eyes. He had never seen a grenade before in real life, let alone held one in his hand.

"Whatcha got there? Some firecrackers? Woo!" Blake smiled over at Mort as he racked another round into the chamber of his rifle. Mort found another grenade in the drawer and tossed them into the bag. "What kind of ammo do we have in there?" Blake asked.

"We got some nine millimeter, some 12-gauge buckshot, and some .300 Winchester Magnum rounds. Any of that mean anything to you?"

Blake didn't immediately answer. Instead he put his eye to the sight of his rifle and pulled the trigger. Mort was able to get his hands over his ears in time, though by now he fully expected that he had suffered permanent hearing damage. "It means it's Christmas, man."

Mort walked over to the crate full of guns, and Blake began pointing out which ones they wanted. In the end, they had two rifles apiece slung over their shoulders, and a couple of handguns stuffed into their pants. "Let's get the hell out of here, get somewhere where we can take a breath, and load up."

As Mort headed to the back door of the store, he looked out into the thrift shop's main floor. The dead were funneling through the one broken window, stepping awkwardly over the now-still corpses that Blake had created. There were ten or so bodies, yet still more came. Clearly, they were not put off by seeing their brethren rotting on the floor, nor were they interested in eating the meat of the dead. Mort shivered. They only want the living.

Mort headed to the back door, and tested it. He pushed it open only to find that it was blocked by something. He pushed harder and heard something tumble over. He stepped into the alleyway to find that it was filled with the dead. Blake bumped into his back as Mort attempted to head back inside.

"What are you doing, man?" Blake said as they momentarily struggled to go in opposite directions.

"There's dead out there."

"There's dead in here, too. At least out there, we have a chance of getting away." Blake pushed Mort aside and stepped into the alleyway to see for himself. He brought the rifle up to his eye. Mort looked back into the store. As Blake began firing, the first of the dead rounded the corner, bumping its shoulder against the corner of the wall and knocking it off-balance for a moment.

"Alright, let's go," Mort said, knowing that death was creeping through the pawn shop. Mort stepped out into the alley with Blake, and closed the door behind him. Both sides of the alleyway were filling with the dead, and he could see more entering to the east and the west. Blake fired his rifle, but it was a losing battle. Without a chance to reload they would be overrun. Mort pressed his back against the door to the alleyway to keep the dead inside trapped. He tried to think, his revolver in his hand, three bullets labeled for the dead.

Then he saw it. The beautiful part of his mind, the escape artist that resided in him, spotted the dumpster down the alleyway. The perfect height. It would do just fine.

"Clear me a way to that dumpster," Mort yelled, running with the bag full of ammunition slung over his shoulder. Blake did his job, and the heads of the dead exploded, as Blake and Mort moved down the alleyway to the dumpster. Mort pulled his revolver and placed it under the chin of one of the dead that Blake had missed. He pulled the trigger and blood and bone shot into the air. It was as if for a brief moment he was standing next to a demented whale that shot gore out of its blowhole instead of water. The brown dumpster was large, and the dead pressed around them. Mort threw the black plastic lid into the air and climbed into the dumpster among bags that were relatively sealed and the smell of decaying food matter.

Blake piled in after him, but Mort hardly noticed, as he was too busy feeling around in the bag for the hand grenades. "Get that lid closed," Mort commanded. Blake did as he was told, and in the darkness Mort felt his hand close around one of the metal eggs. He handed it to Blake, and then he searched for the second one.

"What the hell do you want me to do with this?"

Mort's laugh echoed in the dumpster, and the first of the zombies tried to lift the heavy plastic lid up to no avail. Instead the arms snaked into the dumpster underneath the lid, clawing and trying to grab anything they could find. Mort shivered at the cold touch of their fingers, and then he put his own fingers around something even colder. He pulled the grenade out, triumph in his throat.

"We're going to blow our own asses sky high?" Blake said.

"It beats getting eaten."

"You're a wild man, Mort." Blake smiled. "Alright, these things are old, so as soon as you pull the pin, you toss that Easter egg right out as far as you can. You got that?"

"I got it."

"Alright, on three, pull the pin, and drop it outside. You got that? On three." Blake's voice had a feverish quality. It was if he was high. Was it fear or excitement? Mort had no idea, perhaps it was a mixture of both. Blake counted to three and then yanked on the metal pin. Mort did the same and they tossed the grenades outside the thick metal dumpster, praying that the grenades wouldn't destroy them.

The ensuing blast left them senseless in the dumpster. The force of it rocked the dumpster into the air and onto its side; its black plastic lid fell open, where it rested on the ground. When Mort finally opened his eyes, he did so with a human head inches from his face, trying to bite him. Mort counted it a stroke of luck that the head wasn't attached to a human body.

Mort shook off the stars swimming in his eyes, regretting the movement as soon as he did it. He turned around to see Blake lying unconscious, his cowboy hat smashed on the side and blood dripping from his head. Mort attempted to stand. He staggered around and then fell square on his butt, throwing himself in the opposite direction of the head that was lying on the ground. He stood once more and looked around him. The grenades had left a large spray of gore around the alley. Torsos, limbs, and heads were scattered all around, some of them crawling their way towards him, others appropriately dead.

Mort bent down and gently tapped Blake on the side of the face. It took a while for him to come around, and when he did, his eyes had trouble focusing. Mort helped him to his feet, scrounged their belongings out of the dumpster, and together they staggered out of the alleyway, a stream of the dead following them close behind.

They weren't moving fast, but they were moving fast enough to catch up to the two injured men. Even with his brains scrambled, Mort could see that. Mort spotted another dumpster in the alley that ran behind the shops. He left Blake standing up against the wall while he dragged it to the appropriate position. Mort threw their bags onto the roof and then climbed on top of the dumpster. He dragged Blake up on top of it, and then boosted him up onto the roof.

Then came the hard part. Lifting weights wasn't a typical part of a homeless man's daily regimen. Mort got a handhold on the roof, but couldn't manage to pull himself up. His legs flailed in the air, as the dead began to moan underneath him, their arms reaching to the sky as if in supplication.

"Blake!" There was no answer.

He felt the first hand on his boot, and doubled his efforts, but it was no use. "Blake!"

A hand wrapped around his ankle, squeezing it. Mort screamed in pain. "Blake!"

His fingers started to slip, and he felt another hand grasping at his ankles. Then Blake was there, blood leaking out of his ears, and his eyes glazed over. His rough hand grabbed Mort by the wrists, and with all of the energy that he had left, he pulled Mort onto the rooftop.

They lay there in the sun, gasping and hurting all over. Blake sat on his tail, his hands pressed to his ears, and his eyes squeezed shut. Mort sat up, pulled the guns and ammunition out, and through trial and error, he managed to get them fully loaded. Below them he could hear the moans of the dead.

In the distance, he saw a helicopter fluttering through the air. Mort stood up, and waved his arms. The pilot flying the helicopter either didn't notice or didn't care. Either way, Mort sat back down, and waited for Blake to regain some semblance of his former self. Mort looked back in the direction of the pawn shop. Smoke was rising where they had come from. The grenades might have done more damage than he thought.

Mort pulled a mangled but functional cigarette from his pocket and lit it up, adding his own smoke to the air. It was his last one.

Chapter 14: A New Band

Beelzebub's had been easy enough to find. They actually could have walked there, but riding in the jeep was a nice change of pace, and it kept bullets in their guns and the hands of the dead off their skin. They pulled to a squealing stop in front of the brick structure, its long floor-to-ceiling windows were tinted so that they couldn't see inside. There were no signs of life in the street. There was movement, but not from anything that was living.

They hopped out of the jeep, resisting the urge to fire their weapons at the dead. They had seen how quickly the dead had circled in on the wounded soldier. Even now, their presence was drawing attention. Ace walked to the front of the building and stopped in front of a door set into red brick walls; the propane torches flanking the door no longer guttered flame as they did the night before.

He placed his hand on the black, iron handle of the door and yanked. To his surprise, it swung open with ease. The inside of the building was black, the only sound the buzzing of flies. Ace reached into his pocket and pulled out his trusty lighter. It was a brass Zippo, purchased on one of his previous tours through the United States. Before they had fled the jail, they had claimed their personal effects using a key covered in blood. He was glad he had stopped to liberate it, though the light it cast in the club was minimal. He stepped inside, and pulled his gun free, enjoying the reassuring weight of it in his hand.

The floor of the club was littered with broken glass, puddles of beer, and the occasional pile of blood. No one had bothered to clean up after the concert the night before. That was good. That meant his gear was still here. He felt the men behind him pressing him forward.

"Look for a light," he told the red-bearded man. Without speaking, the man did as he was told, holding his own lighter in the air, dragging its light along with him. Ace felt like an archeologist, discovering the remains of an ancient civilization. "Like motherfucking Indiana Jones," he said under his breath.

Ace stood in the middle of the club, his lighter held above his head, remembering the chaos of the previous night. It seemed like a lifetime ago, him standing on stage with his friends, playing guitar, belting out lyrics, and scanning the crowd for appropriate backstage material. That life was over.

The lights came on suddenly, and Ace blinked his eyes as they adjusted. He snapped his lighter closed. In the bright lights, the club seemed small. On the stage, their instruments still sat, never to be played again. The man with the teardrop tattoo moved behind the counter and began pulling out beers and placing them on the counter. The other men gathered around, thirst on their lips.

Ace had no interest in drinking with them. His mind reeled and roiled with emotions, emotions he wasn't capable of dealing with. Hey Fever's drum set sat silent in the background, the words "Electric Fever" scrawled across the bass drum in angular, yellow script. He walked to the stage and looked at the candy-red bass lying on the scuffed wood of the dance floor. Jungle Fever's blood was still smeared on the frets, the neck of the bass lying several feet from the body. Of all the things Ace had seen over the previous 24 hours, seeing the bass lying broken on the ground was by far the worst.

He leaned against the stage and closed his eyes. He saw the entire night in his head, the entire horrible ordeal. When he opened his eyes, the world was still there, and he rolled onto the stage. He got to his feet, and walked past Hey Fever's drum set, tapping lightly on the floor tom. Hey Fever's half-empty beer still sat on one of the Marshall stacks. He moved to the back of the stage, pushing the ancient, stained, red curtains aside.

He walked down a narrow back corridor to the band room. The cinderblock walls were glazed in red paint buried undernesth thousands of examples of poor graffiti drawn in sharpie. He put his hand to the wooden door of the back room and shoved it open. It slid silently on well-oiled hinges, and he saw inside. He breathed a sigh of relief as he saw that everything was just as they had left it, messy and ready to use.

A baggie filled with white powder sat half open on top of his suitcase, a battered suitcase that his mother had given him. His clothes were bundled underneath, and empty bottle of beer littered the tables and couches. The room was stuffy and hot, the smell of stale alcohol permeating the air. Ace grabbed the baggie out of the suitcase and left the room, abandoning his only possessions, his only reminders of the world that he had left behind some 4,000 miles away. It would be good to forget that world.

Ace returned to the bar and found his guys sitting there drinking themselves silly. He plopped the baggie down on the counter, and the red-bearded man said, "Fuck yeah."

The red-bearded man pulled a credit card from his wallet. Then he used his large, meaty hands to pull the bag open, and with the plastic square, he lifted some of the powder out of the bag and dumped it on the bar's counter. He began chopping at it and forming it into lines. When he was done, he looked around and found a translucent green straw. He was about to snort it, when the red-bearded man looked at Ace and offered him the straw. It was an honorable thing to do; it was the right thing to do. Ace took the proffered straw, bent over the counter, plugged his free nostril, and snorted the powder up his nose.

The chemical concoction numbed his nasal passage immediately, and he felt the familiar rush. He dabbed at his nose, knocking free any loose granules, and leaned back as his heart began to beat faster. He watched as the others lined up, except for the chubby man with the goatee.

"What's wrong? You too good to party?" Ace asked

The pudgy man looked at him and said, "I've never snorted coke before."

Ace smiled at the man. "There's a first time for everything."

"Go on, man. It ain't gonna kill you," the red-bearded man said.

The pudgy man looked at him, uncertainty in his eyes. "You sure?"

"What's your name?" Ace asked him.

"Earl," he said.

"Earl? That name is no good. I'm going to call you Pudge. New world, new names."

Pudge looked at him, clearly uncomfortable with all of the attention. "Now, Pudge, this is a new world. No one is going to come in here and arrest you. All the cops are dead. You saw that." Ace tapped on Pudge's chest, his skinny finger bouncing off of the worried man's breastbone. "How's your heart?"

"Fine as far as I know," Pudge said.

"Then cocaine is fine as far as you know. Do one line. See if you like it. If you don't," Ace spread his hands wide as if to say, "I tried my best."

The red-bearded man handed Pudge the straw, and he bent over the counter, hesitant as if someone was going to tell him he was doing it wrong. He snorted in, his eyes squeezed shut, and he leaned back, coughing a little bit. Ace slapped him on the back, laughing. "See? Not so bad, is it?"

"Yeah," Pudge said his pupils growing wider with every second. "Yeah, that wasn't bad at all."

The red-bearded man snatched the straw from Pudge, and leaned over the counter, snorting his own line without a pause. He passed the straw to the man with the shaved head, who shook his head "no."

"Are you afraid too, Slick?" Ace said.

The man with the shaved head looked at him, and said, "My name's not Slick, and I don't like cocaine."

Ace stood up from his chair, the cocaine rushing through his body, his mind focused and euphoric at the same time. "Your name is Slick."

The man with the shaved head stood up off his stool, took a drink from his beer, and placed it on the counter. "No one tells me what my name is. My name is Marshall, not Slick, not Buddy, not Champ. It's Marshall." Marshall placed his hand on Ace's chest, his own nose inches from Ace's nose. "Don't fuckin' forget it."

Ace laughed. In his head, he saw a world of possibilities. This was the first challenge to his power. This moment was important. This was the moment that Ace had waited for, the moment where he would bind the others to himself for the rest of their pitiful lives. He looked the man in his steel-gray, emotionless eyes. Murderer's eyes, he thought.

He half-smiled at the man and said, "You don't have to do the cocaine... Slick."

At the mention of his new name, the man with the shaved head swung his fist at Ace, a powerful punch with all of his weight behind it. Ace ducked under it with ease, and brought his knee into the groin of the man. He crumpled to the side, and Ace grabbed the baggie of cocaine and pulled out a handful. Then he squatted on the prone man and shoved the powder in the face of the man, blinding him. "What's your name?"

The man with the shaved head wriggled on the ground, his eyes stinging as he tried to breathe. Ace maintained a position on top of the man's chest, but still the man didn't answer. "What's your name?" Ace asked again.

The man with the shaved head did not answer, so Ace punched him in the face, causing the man to crack the back of his head on the floor. Ace stood up and commanded the other men. "Grab him."

The man with the red beard hopped over the counter of the bar while Pudge and the man with the teardrop tattoo pulled the man with the shaved head to his feet.

It was quiet, except for the ragged breathing of the injured man. Ace looked him in the eyes, those steel-gray eyes. Bitch eyes, Ace thought. "What's your name?"

"Slick," the man said, defeat hanging in the air like the smoke from a burning stick of incense.

Ace slapped him on the shoulder and said, "What are you drinking, Slick?"

Slick wiped his face and looked at Ace, gauging the potential danger in the situation. Ace shot a disarming smiled at him. Slick sat on his stool and said, "IPA."

The man with the red beard hopped back over the bar, happy to be done with the bullshit. He fumbled around behind the bar before he pulled out a bottle of beer. He popped it open for the man, and slid it down the bar where Slick caught it. He tipped the bottle up to his lips and drank heavily.

"That was intense," Pudge said.

"What about me? What's my name?" the man with the teardrop tattoo asked.

Ace looked at the man. He was skinny. His arms were covered in coarse black hairs. More hair stuck out of the ring of his collar. "I'm going to call you Spider."

The man with the teardrop tattoo spat his beer on the counter. "Spider? Couldn't you have come up with a more original name? There are a thousand Mexican dudes out there with the nickname Spider."

Ace shrugged his shoulders. "Names are hard. You remind me of a spider. Maybe you will become a legend, and when everybody says the name Spider, they think of you."

Spider shrugged. "One name is as good as the next I suppose."

The man with the red beard handed Ace a beer. "Thank you," Ace said. He looked at the man, trying to think of a name for him. Red... that was a good name, but it was too easy. The man with the red beard was a hulking man, easily six inches taller than Ace. His arms were thick, the skin pink like a pig. No... two animal names would be too much. They already had one Spider in the group.

The hulking man wore light brown Carhartt pants, copper rivets gleaming in the light of the bar. "What are those?" he asked, pointing at the rivets.

"Pants?" the man replied, confusion on his face.

Ace shook his head in frustration. "No, the metal."

The red-bearded man looked down at his pants and smiled in comprehension. "Rivets?"

"Rivets!" Ace banged a fist on the counter. "Those are some slutty rivets, friend. I will call you Slutty Rivets. That's your name."

Slutty Rivets laughed loudly. "I like it," he said. "It's ridiculous, but I like it."

They continued drinking, Slick sulking at the end of the bar, his head resting on his hand, white powder all over his clothes. From outside they could hear the banging of the dead on the tall windows. Their peace wouldn't last much longer, but it was ok for now.

"What about you? What do we call you?" Slutty Rivets asked.

A sheen of sweat clung to Ace's forehead as he sipped from the tall, red, white, and blue can of beer. It was watery, but cool, just the way he liked it. Names... names... names. What was his name in this new world? Who would he be?

Names entered his mind and left quickly, discarded as being too tacky, too silly, or too stupid. In the end, he went with the first fake name he had ever worn. The past was the past, and though this was a new world, some things were still true. He was still crazy as hell. He was still pissed off. He was still ready to burn the world to the ground. "Call me Ace," he said.

From outside, they heard gunshots. Pudge ran over to the window to see what all the commotion was. He stuck his fingers between too slats in the blinds and spread them, giving him enough room to see outside. "We got trouble," Pudge said.

Ace hopped off of his stool, and walked over to the window. He looked outside. Another vehicle had pulled up behind their purloined jeep. The olive green vehicle was larger, more armored, and had a huge machine gun mounted on the back. Soldiers hopped out of the vehicle. It looked like a turtle to Ace. They took aim and fired their rifles, clearing the dead from the immediate area. The majority of the men stood around the perimeter of the street, their eyes scanning the perimeter. One soldier, with a self-important walk, stalked up to the jeep that Ace and his boys had commandeered. He looked inside and checked for keys.

The man didn't see any, so he turned and yelled something at the soldiers behind him, then he noticed the blood inside the jeep. He spoke into a speaker on his shoulder, then he started pointing and yelling orders at the other soldiers. They grouped up and took positions in the street.

Ace couldn't tell what the man had ordered, but he knew it wasn't good. "Get your guns," he said.

They arranged themselves around the bar. Ace sat behind the drum kit on the stage. Slutty Rivets and Pudge were behind the bar, while Slick and Spider hid in the hallway that led to the club's bathrooms. The door to the bar opened, and five soldiers walked into the room. From their vantage point, all they could see was Pudge and Slutty Rivets behind the bar.

"Howdy, boys," Slutty said. "What can I get you?"

The soldiers were confused. They had been expecting a lot of things, but a guy standing calmly behind a bar was not one of them. They were young and confused.

"Don't you know that we're under martial law?" the least confused man said.

"Right," Slutty replied, "we're staying inside in the best place possible. You boys want a beer?"

Ace watched the exchange from behind the drum kit. The dark sunglasses over his eyes made him feel invisible. They were young, they were order, and they were pissing him off.

"No beer for us. We're just wondering if you know what happened to the soldiers that were driving the jeep outside."

Slutty shrugged his shoulders and said, "I don't know anything about no soldiers."

Sweat rolled down Pudge's face. He had the poker face of a five-year-old. "What about you?" the soldier asked. "Have you seen anyone?"

Pudge stammered, unable to form a coherent answer. Ace hated him for it, but he secretly loved him for it as well. Now he could put his plan to work. Ace grabbed a drumstick, and began playing the drums, banging on them rhythmically, a drumbeat that he had heard a thousand times before, a drumbeat that Hey Fever had belted out a thousand times before.

The soldiers jumped at first, but Ace just smiled. They looked at him with surprise and gathered right in front of him. Pudge and Slutty Rivets pulled their guns out, and from the darkness of the hallway, Ace knew that Spider and Slick were doing the same.

"Stop that!" the soldier commanded. "You're going to bring a shitstorm of those things in here. They're attracted to sound!"

Ace channeled his fury into the drumming. The noise was deafening, and he smiled, making sure he had their attention. He banged on the crash cymbal repeatedly, filling the building with violent noise.

"Stop!" the soldier yelled.

Ace grabbed hold of the crash cymbal with his left hand, stifling its raucous ringing. Outside, he could hear more gunshots. Ace smiled. That's exactly what he wanted.

Without warning, Ace dropped the drumsticks to the ground and drew his handgun. The soldiers, dumbfounded by his erratic actions stood there, not knowing what the hell was going on. Ace pulled the trigger, a sneer plastered to his face.

As soon as his first shot was fired, the boys joined in, adding their own rhythm to his beat. They made music, beautiful music that filled Beelzebub's with a sound that was better than any sort of distorted rhythm he could have ever wrung from his electric guitar. Smoke and fire filled the building, and then it was over.

From outside there were more gunshots. Ace hopped off the stage, reloading his weapon. He pulled a rifle off of one of the soldiers lying on the dancehall floor. His boys appeared from their hiding spots.

"That was severe," Spider said.

Ace smiled. He was having a truly excellent time.

Outside, the gunshots had stopped. "Grab an instrument," Ace told them. "It's time for the encore." The boys were confused, and he laughed, a choked strangled thing that sounded more like the death rattle of a madman than an indication of appreciated levity. Through the window, Ace could see them coming. This would have to be a quick performance.

Ace and the boys lined up by the windows, rifles in their hands. Ace took aim at a burly man, a barrel-chested beast of a man who would have wiped the floor with him. But the world was different. Now 130 pounds was as dangerous as 210. His mouth filled with saliva, as he thought about pulling the trigger.

The soldiers on the street looked around, trapped between the dead and wondering what had happened to their own soldiers. They circled around the entrance of Beelzebub's, the building's dark-tinted windows preventing them from seeing the danger that awaited them. "Fire," Ace whispered.

Then he pulled the trigger, blowing a hole in the shoulder of the burly man. He spun and fell to the ground. Others dropped, but the soldiers were quick. They took cover behind the vehicles, and returned fire as they could.

"Move back," Ace yelled over the gunfire. "Stay low." They crab-walked to the back of the building, all except for Slick who was flat on the ground, blood spilling from his throat and pooling on the concrete floor. Ace giggled a bit at the sight, shrugged his shoulders and said, "A four-piece band is better than a five-piece anyway." In the back hall of the club, they reassembled and reloaded.

"What the hell are we doing?" Pudge asked.

Ace clapped him on the shoulder and said, "We're fighting for our rights." The sentiment did not assuage Pudge, and his face had the look of one who is given the news that they are about to die.

"What's the plan?" Slutty asked.

Ace thought for a second. There were maybe five soldiers outside, with hundreds of dead closing in. But Ace didn't want the dead to have all the fun. "Pudge, you stay here. Fire a shot out the window every few seconds. Slutty Rivets, Spider, you come with me."

They ran through the graffiti-scarred corridor, and Ace pounded out the emergency exit to the back of the building, Spider and Slutty Rivets on his heels. They could hear Pudge's gunfire. It was answered by more gunfire from the streets. Ace reached the corner of the building and pressed his back to the bricks, enjoying their coolness in the heat. Sweat covered his body, and the sound of gunfire masked their booted footsteps.

Ace cautiously leaned out, surveying the situation. There were four men, two behind their commandeered jeep and two behind the armored vehicle. That was good, or at least he thought so until he spotted the man sitting behind the mounted machine gun of the armored vehicle. He slowly pulled his head back and looked at Slutty Rivets and Spider.

"Five guys," he said. "Two behind the jeep, two behind that giant thingy, and one on the gun."

"The fifty caliber?" Slutty asked.

"I don't know what you call it. The big gun on the thingy," Ace replied.

"That's a fifty caliber machine gun," Slutty said. "That thing will turn your body to hamburger and mist with just one round."

Hamburger. Yum. Ace was hungry again. "You guys worry about the guys on the ground. I'll kill the guy on the machine gun."

Ace didn't wait for the guys to react. He ran out to the street, his eye already sighting down the rifle. He pulled the trigger, and the sound of automatic fire rang through the streets. Sparks bounced off the metal guards around the machine gun, and he saw the man duck his head down. The turret turned towards them, and Ace aimed again. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Spider and Slutty Rivets gun down the men behind the vehicles. They didn't have a chance.

The machine gun was almost dead on with him, so he danced to the side, firing his rifle at the tiny square between the metal guards. More bullets bounced off the guards, and Ace thought, This is it. This is how I die.

Then he saw Pudge climbing up the side of the vehicle, a handgun gripped in his fist. There was a light pop and a puff of red mist, and then Pudge was jumping off the top of the vehicle, a huge smile on his face. Ace had never been so glad to see the man's forgettable face framed by his scruffy goatee. Ace laughed out loud and raised his gun over his head, firing rounds into the sky like a primal ape who had just discovered fire.

The dead were closing in quickly, so they scavenged what they could, rifles, cigarettes and cash off the dead men's bodies. Ace was digging through the pockets of the dead soldier in the turret when he heard the noise. Echoing off the buildings was a thumping. It was getting closer. He scanned the skies with his eyes, trying to pinpoint where the sound was coming from. It was a helicopter. His boys looked around as well. They climbed into the armored vehicle, slamming the doors behind them and looking up at the sky through the armored windows.

As Ace was looking up at the sky, he felt a movement beneath him, and the soldier whose pockets he had been rifling through sprang into action. The soldier gripped his arm, and the grip was so strong that Ace thought the bones in his arm were going to snap. He yelled for help, but the chopper hovering over their heads prevented anyone from hearing him. Ace pushed the soldier as far back from him as he could, which wasn't very far in the confines of the turret. With his forearm locked under the soldier's chin, he pushed his head up, and with his free arm, he reached behind and pulled his revolver free. He placed it underneath the chin and squeezed his eyes shut as he pulled the trigger. The dead soldier slumped in the turret, and Ace pushed the corpse out of the turret and onto the floor of the vehicle.

Ace turned his eyes back to the sky in time to see the helicopter hovering over them.  Without thinking, Ace guided the machine gun in its direction. He pulled the trigger on the gun, and rounds began pouring out of the weapon. A belt to his left slid through the machine gun, and thick brass shells fell to the floor of the turret, clattering metallically before falling inside the vehicle. His initial spray was off target, but it was only a second before he peppered the side of the hovering helicopter with rounds, his ears ringing from the noise.

Holes erupted in the windows of the helicopter, and it began to swerve off course, spinning out of control. The helicopter hit the ground hard, pieces of metal flying off of the chopper. It did not explode as Ace had hoped, so he continued firing the machine gun, until the belt of ammunition was gone. Still no explosion. He cursed in his head, as he hopped out of the turret.

"Holy shit, man! You just took down a chopper," Spider yelled. At least, that's what Ace thought he yelled. His ears weren't currently functioning at that moment. After years of playing concerts without earplugs, his hearing had deteriorated sharply. Now he could hardly hear a thing.

Ace ignored the praise of the others and began rooting through the back of the vehicle. Two benches faced each other, and above them was some room for storage, but there wasn't much room for anything. "Shit!" he screamed, punching the steel wall in frustration.

Slutty Rivets looked at him, a quirk of a smile on his face, partly hidden by his red beard. He held out his hand and said, "Looking for one of these."

Ace looked down and saw a spherical shape, topped with a ring and a handle, a hand grenade. This will make beautiful music, he thought. Ace hopped out of the vehicle, the cold metal of the grenade in his hand. He took a few steps towards the helicopter, unsure of how far he could throw the thing. It weighed as much as a medium-sized rock. He hefted it in his hand again.

A little closer, he thought. Ace jogged forward, his eyes on the helicopter. From inside the cockpit, he could see movement, whether it was a living person or a dead person trying to escape, he didn't know, and he didn't particularly care. A blood-smeared hand bashed against the spider-webbed glass of the cockpit.

"Throw it, pussy!" Spider yelled at him. Ace laughed, pulled the pin, and threw the grenade as far as he could. His throw was short, but it took a fortuitous bounce and rolled a few feet, lodging under the middle of the helicopter wreckage. The anticipation was intense, and then it exploded. The wreckage lifted off the ground, shards of metal flying into the air. It erupted in a bloom of flame that rocked the buildings next to the wreck, shattering windows and making Ace's ears ring once more.

Ace fell back on the ground when the grenade exploded. He watched the second explosion, the smoke and flames curing upwards to the sky. Glorious.

Chapter 15: Digging In

This was a war that they would lose. The only real question was how long they would continue to fight it. Sergeant Tejada had delivered his latest report. In the last ten hours, they had lost close to 1,000 troops and made hardly a dent in the population of the reanimated.

The reanimated, that was the official term that Washington had settled on. The men had logically taken to calling them Annies. At first, he had wanted to snap at the first man he had heard use the term, but it was typical army behavior. It was better to give them a cutesy nickname than to call them what they were. Calling them the reanimated reminded the men of the fact that their enemies used to be the people that they were sworn to protect and fight for. Calling them the reanimated reminded the men that their own families might be out there, walking, searching for someone to eat. If they wanted to call them Annies to feel better about it, then that was fine by McCutcheon. If calling them Annies prevented them from freezing up when they had to pull the trigger, then that was also fine by him.

Bad news just kept rolling in. An entire squad had gone missing, dead or deserted, McCutcheon didn't know, but he knew things were going to get worse before they got better. They had lost two Apaches in the last 10 hours, in addition to the five-hundred men. One had been inexplicably shot down in the city, and the other had just disappeared. The men were replaceable, the choppers were not. The entire United States Army was spread across the country so thin that it was only a matter of time before the President unleashed the final protocol, and they would neat to make a hasty retreat when the orders came down the pipeline.

They were on borrowed time here. The best they could do was gather survivors, thin the numbers, and keep a sizeable fleet of movable vehicles for when the order came down. The reports out of New York led him to believe that the order would come sooner than later. In New York, a hundred-thousand troops had been whittled down to nothing in the span of a day.

Philly and Boston were much the same, but there was still damn little news about Denver. He had tried his wife and daughter's cell phones a dozen times in the last ten hours, but they hadn't even rung. He pushed thoughts of his family to the side. He had a job to do, and he was going to do it.

He sent a runner to find Sergeant Tejada. Tejada was a good man, capable, but he was the type of soldier that never wanted to get too high in the army. He was comfortable leading men and following orders. Making decisions was not his forte. As Lieutenant General McCutcheon's right hand, he was indispensible.

Sergeant Tejada entered the warehouse, saluted and stood at attention. "At ease," McCutcheon said dismissively. "Sergeant Tejada, what is the report from the refugee camps?"

"Sir, the entire Coliseum is secure. However, Major Miller reports that the fences aren't secure enough. He estimates the crowd of Annies to be somewhere at ten thousand."

"Jesus," McCutcheon said, unable to control his reaction. He wiped his hand across his face as if there were something hanging off of it. "'Ten thousand did you say?"

"Yes, sir."

"Continue with the report, Sergeant," McCutcheon prompted, his mind still trying to grasp the concept of ten thousand of those things held back by chain-link fences topped with razor wire.

"They have plenty of food, but he requests more ammunition. All road traffic to the refugee center should be suspended until the perimeter is cleared. They have lost several squads who were trying to drop off refugees. The squads were overrun in the process."

"Alright. This is what I want. Pull the choppers from search and rescue. I want them shuttling survivors and ammunition back and forth between the Coliseum and here. How many men are at the Coliseum camp?"

"Three thousand, sir, less some casualties."

"Right. Well, give them the ammo that they need. All search and rescue operations are to bring any survivors here. We'll transport them to the refugee center from here by helicopter. Anything else?"

"Sir, the reports from the soccer stadium are somewhat..." the Sergeant swallowed before he finished... "worse."

McCutcheon didn't like two things, the fact that Sergeant Tejada had held back intel and the fact that Tejada actually seemed hesitant to give him some news. "Well, don't keep me in suspense, Sergeant. Spit it out."

"Sir, the soldiers at the soccer stadium report that it is an indefensible position. They have taken heavy casualties, and refugees have all but stopped trickling in."

"Heavy casualties? What are we talking here, Tejada?"

"They're down to half and ammo is an issue, sir."

McCutcheon did the math in his head. 1,500 soldiers gone... in the space of a single day. How was this even possible? What the hell was going on out there? "Call 'em back. Get those choppers going. Bring the refugees first, then get those soldiers out of there. Anything else, Sergeant?"

"No, sir."

"Very well then. You know what to do." Sergeant Tejada saluted and turned smartly, marching out of McCutcheon's makeshift office. "And Sergeant?" Tejada turned around to regard McCutcheon. "Never be afraid to give me bad news. I want to hear it as soon as it happens." Tejada nodded his understanding, and then made his way out of the warehouse to spread the orders.

McCutcheon stood up from his seat and walked outside with a cup of regulation issue coffee in his hand, mud as it was more commonly known. He exited Warehouse #206 and stepped outside. Shading his eyes from the falling sun. 2,500 soldiers in a single day. At that rate, he would be out of soldiers in less than two weeks. Now was the crucial time. Now was the time where they either wrapped a single, iron, military fist around this problem or they broke and ran.

Was Sheila out there, driving towards some refugee center that was woefully ill-equipped to handle the problem? The Coliseum hadn't been the best choice, but it offered the best vantage point. Its roof was more accessible for snipers, and it could easily be fenced off. Also, the Moda Center had been trashed by the time they had first laid eyes on it, the reanimated crawling through the building in the darkness. Ten of those 2,500 dead soldiers had been men sent in to clear the place.

The soccer stadium? Well, that was a tactical error. They simply hadn't known the types of numbers they would be dealing with. The dead were growing exponentially, while their own numbers were shrinking. It was a bad day to be in charge.

In the fading light of the day, McCutcheon scanned the perimeter of Terminal 2. The shipping containers were being stacked on the backside of their own chain-link fence, creating a solid barrier and additional walkways for the soldiers to use. The height of the shipping containers provided an vantage point for the soldiers as they kept the perimeter cleared of the dead. Even now, he saw some of them taking potshots at the reanimated who had gathered around the terminal to watch the proceedings. Within hours of being on site, McCutcheon had issued a universal permission-to-fire order.

Through one of the gaps in the shipping container wall, he saw one of the reanimated fall. It didn't matter; three more were approaching in the distance. How much ammunition did they have? Were there enough bullets to put one into every citizen of the United States if need be? McCutcheon shook his head and took another sip of mud. Dark thoughts came to him.

A fresh-faced soldier with military-issue glasses sprinted up to him with a sheet of paper clutched in his hand. McCutcheon took it from him and looked at the words printed on it. He sighed heavily and dismissed the soldier. New York was gone. It would only be a matter of hours, maybe minutes, before the news made the rounds. Morale was fucked already, and this was the last bit of news that they needed.

The good news was that he had been promoted, although he didn't know what good the pay raise would do him if the world was on the verge of collapsing and he had no family to spend it on. He crumpled up the paper and threw it on the ground. He watched his men as they worked, stalking the compound, their rifles unslung, some stacking boxes and digging in, others rushing about carrying out any of a thousand different orders and tasks that were needed to make the military machine function.

McCutcheon took another sip of mud, and looked back at the gap between the shipping containers. There was another rifle pop, and a reanimated woman fell in a heap. There were five more behind her, approaching through the maze of industrial buildings that surrounded Terminal 2, the once bustling Port of Portland.

He took a final sip of coffee, but couldn't quite force himself to swallow it. He spit it onto the ground and dumped his coffee mug out. He shook his head at the words on the cup. It was a white piece, cheap and laced with fine cracks from years of use. "World's Best Dad," it said. What a cruel coffee mug, he thought.

Chapter 16: Watching the Gauges

Colin Murphy sat at the control board of the Boardman Power Plant, his feet up on the console and his arms behind his head. That he felt no sense of impending doom was a mystery to him. The radio's reports had become even more dire, and the men and women that had fled the power plant had yet to return. He should have been panicking, but he had his job to focus on.

Murph watched the monitors, moving from one mundane checklist to the next. The power plant usually had twenty to thirty employees working there at any given time. Most of the members of the staff were redundant. Power was serious business; there always needed to be a replacement if someone became ill... and there also needed to be a replacement for that replacement. But now it was just himself and the Chief.

"Get your goddamn shit heels off that console, Murph," the Chief yelled as he burst abruptly through the door to the control room.

Murph pulled his boots off the console so fast that he ripped something in his guts, the muscles knotting in instantaneous pain. He groaned as the Chief slapped him on the shoulder. "How are things looking out there?"

Murph checked the instruments on the console. The lights were right and the dials were normalized. "It's all green, Chief." They stood in silence, watching the monitors flit from one scene to the next. Murph had no idea what to do next. He wasn't much of a conversationalist. You might even call him awkward. The thing was, the Chief wasn't much better. He was comfortable shouting orders, but until this afternoon in the cafeteria, Murph had never even thought of him as human. Sure, he was shaped like a man, talked like a man, and ate like a man, but in all other respects, he came off as something entirely emotionless and almost robotic. To see him soften and actually agree to let power plant employees walk off the job was completely unexpected.

"Hell of a thing, huh, Murph?"

"What?" Murph was caught off guard by the Chief's sudden words, and then he covered it up by saying what he usually did in these situations. "Uh... yeah. Totally." Nothing got a man out of an awkward situation like saying the phrase, "Yeah. Totally."

The Chief continued rambling, and Murph knew that he was safe for a little while. "Lots of people out there counting on us. You know that?"

Murph did his best to focus on the Chief's words. He seemed distracted, frazzled, the way Murph was whenever he got up enough guts to talk to a woman who wasn't three sheets to the wind.

"You know, I got family in Portland."

Murph swallowed and said, "Yeah?"

"Yep. I got a boatload of cousins that left the rez to find a better life there."

Murph's palms began to sweat as his conversational skills kicked in. "What's a rez?"

The Chief laughed hard and slapped him on the shoulder. "The reservation." Murph's face was blank. "Where the Native Americans live?"

"You mean Indians?"

The Chief's laugh was booming in the confined space of the control room. "Yeah, you got it." They lapsed into another awkward silence.

The monitors flitted by, never-ending parades of still photos with no one in them, the loading dock, the floor, the conveyor belt, the gate outside, the boiler, the cafeteria. Nothing. No movement. Just pictures of a world that had become still. Murph wanted to see the workers there, moving about, laughing and jawing back and forth the way they did, but there was nothing, just cold concrete, unused furniture, and empty space.

"What about you? You got anybody out there?" The Chief asked.

Murph had nobody, but he didn't feel comfortable sharing the fact with the Chief. "I got someone in The Dalles," he lied. He didn't know why. He didn't even know himself. The Chief silently nodded, his brown-skinned face bobbing up and down in the florescent glow of the control booth.

"Do you think they'll come back?" Murph asked.

"It's been hours. I'm sure if they were going to come back, they would have done so by now. I'm sure we'll all be just fine." The Chief slapped him on the shoulder one more time and then turned to leave saying, "Keep up the good work, Murph."

Murph just stared straight ahead at the console and the monitors above it. When the door closed behind the Chief, he relaxed, the tension draining out of his body so that it filled the chair he was sitting in. He leaned back in the chair and put his heels back up on the console. What was happening out there?

His mind wandered, conjuring absurd what-if situations. He wished he actually had a girl in The Dalles. Hell, he wished he had a girl anywhere. He imagined himself tossing his work badge on the cafeteria tables and rushing out with the other men and women to save his true love. She would be huddled in a house somewhere, waiting for him to appear and save the day. Then he would kick down the door, and they would embrace. Perhaps sweeping romantic music would be playing in the background.

Murph punched up the boiler feed and stared at it as he played scenes of heroic sacrifice in his mind. The conveyor belt marched on in silence, dropping load after load of coal into the boiler where it was turned into electricity. Murph didn't care about the process. He didn't need to. He just needed to watch the lights on the console and make sure all the needles on the numerous gauges stayed out of the red.

On the monitor, the light from the boiler shifted as if it were alive. The monitor was black and white, and the light brightened and darkened, fading in and out almost as if there were a pattern. Murph was on the edge of understanding the pattern, understanding the secret of the power plant, when a body tumbled over the edge of the conveyor belt and into the boiler.

Murph's first reaction was to check the gauges. Chunks of coal were one thing, but an entire human body was something entirely different. There was no reaction on the gauges, and for a second, Murph second guessed himself. Maybe he had imagined he had seen a body. Maybe his mind was playing tricks on him.

He unlocked the monitor feed and watched as it cycled through each of the cameras. Cafeteria... nothing. Loading dock... the Chief smoking a cigarette. The floor, machinery shrouded in shadows chugging away. The conveyor belt... just a thousand feet of industrial belts pulling raw coal into the boiler. The gate outside... oh shit. The gate outside.

Chapter 17: In the Coliseum

After the second indignity of having to take their clothes off, Clara and Joan had made their way inside the arena. They had eaten food on Styrofoam trays and milled about in the parade of refugees. They had slept on the arena floor, on makeshift cots that had been set up for that purpose. There were more people than there were cots, and Joan and Clara had been one of the first to arrive at the Coliseum.

For a while, the flood of refugees was fairly steady. Big green trucks would pull up to the fences after a path was cleared for them and drop off survivors. Helicopters constantly buzzed overhead, dropping off supplies and refugees. Soldiers stood on the scaffolding, gunning down the dead, but in Clara's mind, something seemed off.

With the amount of dead on hand, there should be a steady stream of gunfire, but their numbers had only swelled throughout the day. Clara sat in the fading evening light trying to figure out what they were doing. All of her inquiries had been rebuffed by the soldiers that were in the courtyard. They weren't avoiding sharing information with her; rather, they seemed too afraid to talk about their own situation, as if saying it would make it all seem too real.

Clara clomped around the front of the Coliseum, doing laps in her walking boot on an ankle that still hurt mildly. In a thinly disguised attempt at hitting the soldiers up for information, she had spent the better part of the afternoon bumming cigarettes from random soldiers she sae taking a smoke break. They were more than happy to give her a cigarette, the information not so much. Her throat was raw from smoking when Joan appeared at her side just as the sun was going down.

"Why don't you come inside and get something to eat?"

Clara didn't say anything. She just kept surveying the fences, the worried look on the soldiers' faces, and the growing throng of the dead. "Hey, you ok?" Joan asked.

Clara turned to Joan and said, "No. I'm not ok. We're not safe here."

Joan laughed, dismissing Clara's worries. "What are you talking about? Look at all these soldiers. If we're not safe here, then where are we safe?" Clara looked around the courtyard, taking in the somber faces and the worried looks.

"Nowhere probably," she replied.

Joan put her arm around Clara's shoulders, and turned her around. "Come on. Stop worrying. You'll feel much better after you eat."

Behind them a new group of survivors was being forced to strip. Clara didn't want to see the large ginger naked anyway, so she let Joan usher her inside. The Coliseum reeked of stale glory and the spilled beer that had sunk into the spiderweb cracks that laced the utilitarian concrete floor. The floor was lacquered to a shine, but the smell was still there, clawing its way up her nostrils. It was a better smell than outside. Damn that hot weather. The stench of the dead was starting to become overpowering. A couple of hours ago, a soldier had begun handing out camouflage bandanas for the men on the fences to put over their faces. She wished that she had bugged the soldier for one, but he seemed in a hurry, and she wasn't quite sure of her place in the refugee camp. Everyone seemed nice, but she felt like a child in a classroom, the soldiers the teachers. She was sure her autonomy was just an illusion, and that it could be taken away at any moment.

They walked around the concourse, Joan nattering on and on, as if they were at some sort of ridiculous sleepover where the entire city had been invited, alive or dead. "I think we have it good here," she said. "I've seen their set-up and everything seems to be running nice and smooth. The triage center is largely empty, but they're letting me help out."

"That's great," Clara said noncommittally, imagining Joan as the teacher's pet of the classroom. They stood in line, and Clara suffered through Joan's mindless chit-chat. They had been through a lot together, and though Clara didn't necessarily like Joan, she was the only person she knew in the entire city. Clara had kept largely to herself. After high school, that had been the way of things. The friends she had made in high school drifted away, people she had thought would be in her life forever just seemed to sort of vanish into thin air. So-and-so had a child. So-and-so went off to college. So-and-so moved to Europe.

Her own family had moved around the country, dispersing after she graduated as if to say, "Well, we did that. Another one fit for society. Now we can retire to Florida." Her parents had only existed in post cards and Facebook posts for the last five years. Then her mom died, and it was if her father had died as well. The post cards came less and less, and they only occasionally talked on the phone. How long had it been? Six months since she had talked to him? She hated herself for that.

Her life had largely been a solitary one, until Courtney came into her life. Rough around the edges, snarly as hell, but sweeter than sweet underneath the tattoos and attitude. No one had ever treated her like he had. She was his entire world, and he was hers. They had spent years existing in each other's presence, and then he was gone.

"Look at that. I'm starving. What is that? Chicken?" Joan was rambling on about the food while Clara was lost in her thoughts.

"Could you shut up about the food?" she snapped. Joan closed her mouth. They stood in silence as soldiers ladled scoops of food onto white Styrofoam trays with different compartments pressed into them. The silence was large, so large it threatened to crush Clara down onto the concrete floor and press the life out of her. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean it."

"No, I'm sorry. I'm treating this like some sort of vacation, but the truth is, I still don't feel like I'm able to believe that this is all actually happening."

"I was thinking of Courtney. I was thinking of how the entire last decade of my life was spent being with him, eating with him, sleeping with him. We did everything together, and it was always alright. No matter what happened at college, no matter how the loans kept piling up, I always knew he would be there, and now he's not. The time when I need him most, and he's gone."

Joan had no words for what Clara was feeling. Her own existence had been one of petty self-involvement. The moment she could move out from underneath her parents' Rockwellian existence, she had jumped at the chance. They walked through the concourse, words dying on their lips.

Chapter 18: Ginger Fluff

Rudy sat in a run-down bathroom stall of the Memorial Coliseum. Shame still burned through his body. Rudy had never willingly taken his clothes off in front of anyone, and then he had been forced to do it right there in front of the most beautiful woman he had ever met... he thought he was going to die from embarrassment.

Right there in the sunshine, he had pulled his shirt off, exposing his pale skin. If he had to give a name to the shade of his skin, it would be "milkworm," a special combination of skim milk and maggot white, dotted with freckles that made him look like the first drips of a Jackson Pollock painting.

The shirt was bad enough, but the rest had been even worse. "C'mon. Pants too, Chubs," one of the soldiers had said. He looked at the soldier, pleading in his eyes. "Anything but that," his eyes said. The soldier's look was hard and disinterested. He was too busy ogling Chloe to stare at the fat pale man who looked like he was on the verge of tears.

Rudy had undone his belt, digging underneath the folds of his gut to unbuckle it. Then he had wheezed as he leaned over to undo his shoes, his breathing disrupted by the pressure of his gut smashed between his chest and his thighs. His head was dizzy from bending over, and with relief he finally kicked off his shoes. His socks were next, and he bounced around on one leg, trying to pull the socks off of his feet. They were slightly moist from the situation. It seemed that his feet were always in a constant state of perspiration whenever stress was involved. He managed to pull his right sock off, his girth jiggling as he bounced to maintain his balance, but he fell to the ground while trying to pull off the second sock.

Then it was time, time to do the deed. With his pants unzipped, and his belt hanging open like floppy dog ears, he hesitated. A soldier to his right yelled, "C'mon, fat boy. Let's see that truffle shuffle." The soldiers laughed at him, and his skin went from milkworm to strawberry milk in no time at all.

"You guys are real assholes, you know that?" Amanda said.

The soldier that had said the comment looked slightly embarrassed by Amanda's comment, but it was nothing to the embarrassment that Rudy felt as he placed his hands on the top of his pants in preparation to do the deed.

"Go on, Rudy. I won't look," Amanda said.

Rudy watched her put a hand over her eyes, and then he became even more embarrassed when he realized that she was already naked. Quickly, while her eyes were covered, he shoved his pants down, exposing his elephantine thighs and buttocks. His ginger fluff glowed in the fading daylight, and his penis was little more than an acorn.

He heard a musical laugh from his right, and he realized he had forgotten all about Chloe. He turned to look at her. He didn't notice her perfect breasts or the shaved smoothness of her own nudity. All he saw was the amusement on her face, her hand pressed to her mouth to stifle the laughter.

"Is that good enough?" Rudy spun in a circle for the entire world to see.

The soldier nodded his head in a professional manner, and Rudy pulled his pants up as quick as he could. He threw his shirt on over his head, and stuffed his thick feet into his shoes, stomping on the heels as he ran inside the Coliseum, his bag slung over his shoulder.

He stalked into the building, its age showing in the dated designs, cold concrete with little consideration for comfort. The concourse was twenty-feet wide, the ceiling was an off-white laced with pipes and cheap florescent lights that gave the entire place the feeling of a morgue. People milled around, their faces forlorn and haunted. It was a solemn place, like a library. Rudy headed immediately for the bathroom, a door-less expanse lined with stainless steel troughs for urine, and stalls that were barely wide enough to accommodate Rudy's bulk.

It was his intention to live out the rest of the days of his life in the bathroom. He had never been so embarrassed, not when his third foster mother had caught him masturbating, not when they had pulled down his pants in gym class, not when Becky Jurgenson had caught him staring dreamily at her in the middle of Mr. Patterson's social studies in middle school. This was the type of embarrassment that could kill a man... it could kill a Rudy even quicker.

Rudy squeezed his eyes shut. That look. That fucking look on her face. The words played through his head in a loop, over and over. Tears came to his eyes, and great bursts of pent up emotion escaped his throat in sobs, like a seal gagging on a fish. He bashed the side of the toilet stall with his hand, not minding the pain that he felt. It was better than the embarrassment.

"You alright in there?" a man asked, his voice strained.

Rudy rolled his head to the side and looked heavenward. Could this day get any worse? A world full of undead, showing my little penis to the hottest woman in the world, and now crying next to some guy taking a shit. What's next? He tried to sound as if he were in command of his voice, but he blubbered as he said, "I'm fine."

"You don't sound fine, man," the voice said. "What the matter? You run out of toilet paper? Here." A brown-skinned hand thrust a wad of toilet paper under the door.

Rudy couldn't help himself, he laughed just a little bit, wiping his snotty nose with the back of his arm. "No, I'm fine."

"Well if it ain't toilet paper, it must be family. You lose someone?"

Rudy sighed, a ragged hitching thing that somehow made everything not seem so bad. People out there were losing family, dying, killing loved ones, and here he was crying about someone seeing his penis. "I don't have anyone to lose."

"Then it must be girls. That's nice. Girl problems is much better than the problems most of us got going on right now."

"Yeah. I suppose you're right."

He heard the man straining in the stall next to him. "Goddamn right I'm right."

"Thanks," Rudy said.

"No problem," the man said.

Rudy waited for the man to finish his business and leave before he wiped his face, and tied his shoes. Maybe it wouldn't be so bad, he thought. He pushed the stall open and walked out into the concourse, the sting of the embarrassment fading. It would always be there, just like Becky Jurgenson, but he could deal with it. Rudy looked down the concourse and spotted a black man walking away, baggy pants, a shiny bald head, and heavy tan boots on his feet. He thanked him silently from a distance and went to find Amanda. If Chloe was there, well, then he would just swallow his pride and deal with it.

Chapter 19: Dinnertime

Katie sat in the nosebleed seats of the Coliseum, her back pressed against the cold concrete wall. She sat alone staring down at the buzz on the floor of the Coliseum. The Memorial Coliseum was home to the Portland Winterhawks, a junior hockey team that had produced some of the best talent in the NHL, at least that's what her husband Jason had said when she had asked him what exactly the Winterhawks were. Their logo was the head of a Native American with multi-colored feathers hanging in his black hair. How that related to hockey was anyone's guess. As far as she knew, there was no tribe named Winterhawk and there was no bird named a winterhawk either. She guessed it was better than Braves or Warriors or something generic like that.

Right now, people were tromping across the logo, which was usually covered by three-quarters of an inch of ice. She wondered if anyone would ever skate across that logo again. Katie sat, wrapped in dark thoughts, a blanket to keep her mind from the other emotions that were struggling to escape from her. She didn't want them. She didn't want the sadness, the grief, the rage. She would take a triple dose of denial. When she had first come in, a lady had greeted her, and chatted to her, asking her if she had lost anyone. Katie said, "No."

The lady had shaken her head in confusion at Katie's terse response, then she had walked away, a hurt look on her face. That was fine with her. The people here wanted to bond. They wanted to feel better. Katie just wanted her gun back. Her harrowing entrance into the refugee camp had been the first sign that she had most likely made a mistake. Now she was intent on escaping from the Coliseum, getting some sort of weapon, and leaving the city altogether. It was the only play that made sense. If her mind had been right, she would have figured it out a lot sooner, but the idea of being someplace safe had called to something within her. Perhaps it called to her willingness to abandon responsibility and let someone else do the thinking.

Katie's stomach gurgled. She was hungry and a little drunk. They had taken her gun, but allowed her to keep her tiny bottles of wine. She would have traded them in a heartbeat for the gun, but the soldiers weren't interested in trades. They were interested in talking big, maintaining a sense of authority, and denying the fact that every hour more and more of those things showed up, shambling and pressing against the woefully pathetic fences that encircled the Coliseum.

The flow of refugees had slowed down, whether that was because most people were dead or because they simply couldn't reach the Coliseum, Katie didn't know. Either way, it all meant bad news to Katie. She kicked the seat in front of her, and swore under her breath.

On the floor of the Coliseum, survivors huddled in groups, their Styrofoam trays resting on their knees. Some slept, some wept, but they all had the same look of shock on their face. There were few children, and the ones that were there sat as if in a daze, their worlds shattered into so many pieces that they had no idea how to even begin putting them all back together. Katie couldn't look at the children for long before thoughts of her own child started to bubble up.

Food. If she was going to escape, she was going to have to find something to eat. Katie rose from her seat and stumbled down the stairway that led to the concourse, her purse in her hand, tiny bottles of wine clinking around inside. She exited the stadium and found herself on the dirty gray concourse. It had an industrial, heartless feel almost as uncomfortable as the view through the glass front of the Coliseum. Soldiers packed the Coliseum's broad courtyard, a square of concrete that sat before long windows that led from the floor to the Coliseum's airy ceiling. The soldiers were out there, rifles in hands, and beyond them were the fences, backed by scaffolding that the soldiers stood upon to shoot at the dead outside. There were thousands of them. There was a sea of rotting flesh out there, pawing at the chains of the fences. The soldiers on top were shooting at the dead below, the noise of rifle shots was unceasing and muffled only by the thick glass windows of the Coliseum. Other soldiers sat below, filling magazines with clips of ammunition and stripping and cleaning rifles that had been fired throughout the day. They were all busy, and they were barely making a dent.

A chopper lifted straight into the air from the courtyard, its rotors whirring into invisibility and blasting the soldiers with a gritty wind. Shell casings rolled across the ground, brass stars twinkling underneath the generator powered floodlights in the courtyard. A soldier ran inside on some sort of mission, and as the door swung open, a blast of air from outside hit her in the face like a punch, the smell of thousands of dead that had spent most of the day putrefying in the sun. Her gag reflex was strong, but she clamped her hand over her face and moved away from the front of the building, stalking around the concourse to find where they were serving food.

She had seen other refugees moving across the Coliseum floor, paper plates of steaming food in hand. She hitched her purse up on her shoulder. It was all she had left, and it was about the most worthless possession anyone could have in a time like this. Liable to be snagged by the dead, she knew it was only a matter of time before she would have to give it up. When her wine was gone, she would toss the bag into one of the many trash bins around the arena, along with her credit cards, her wallet, and all the make-up she had dutifully applied to her face for the last three decades of her life. She hadn't quite decided what to do with her cell phone. Part of her wanted to keep it, but another part of her wanted to bury it in one of the garbage cans, along with the pictures of her husband and child that were stored on it.

She pulled the cell phone from her purse, a clunky chunk of glass, metal and plastic. It was an outdated phone by society standards, nothing fancy, but it held pictures, some songs, and a list of her few contacts. Ever since Kevin had been born, her list of contacts had slowly dwindled until it was just her, her brother in Vermont, and her mother. She opened up her list of contacts... so small, so pointless. Having a child had been the worst choice she could have ever made.

Katie selected her mother and listened as the phone began to ring. She hung the phone up after two rings, and tossed it into the nearest garbage can, tears threatening to escape from her eyes. She walked fast, as if the phone would jump up out of the garbage and follow her around. Katie didn't want to know. She didn't want to know how her 70-year-old mother was surviving this. She didn't want to have that conversation. She didn't want to tell her what had happened to Jason and Kevin. Most of all, she didn't want the phone to go to voicemail. She didn't want to hear her mother's voice telling her to leave her name and phone number so that she could get back to her. Not getting an answer would be the worst.

She walked along the concourse, until she came to a white trailer that had been set up to serve food to the refugees. That's what they were now, refugees in their own country, in their own home, fleeing from a disaster that seemed to have struck the world down in one fell swoop.

When she had first arrived, she overheard two people talking about causes of the disaster. Maybe it was nature trying to create a blank slate. Maybe God was real, and he was pissed. Katie laughed in her head. What a waste of time their conversation had been. Two scared men trying to figure out who or what they should blame. Blame wasn't going to make it go away. If anything, knowing would just make it worse. Katie was glad she didn't know why the end of the world was happening. Knowing why would lead to the hope of being able to stop it. Stopping it would mean continuing on for who knew how long with the guilt of killing her husband and child... the guilt of knowing that she had, in her most melancholy moments, actually fantasized about doing it before the world had rotted.

 There were two lines of people waiting to be served. Boxes of bulk food items were stacked haphazardly around the trailer. She could see soldiers working feverishly inside the trailer, dishing out food as fast as they could, but still they could not keep up with the demand. The refugees stood, a hundred deep, many of them lost in their own thoughts. Smiles were few and far between.

Katie stepped up behind a man with a red beard. His hands were placed protectively on the shoulders of two children, and their eyes were painted with sorrow. They did not speak. They stood there, mute, waiting in line like cows for the slaughter. The children made Katie feel sad. How would they die? Would they get eaten? Would their father murder them to save them from an eternity stalking the world as living dead? Would he do nothing?

There was only one thing that Katie felt good about, knowing that she had ended her own child's twisted existence. Kevin wouldn't be target practice for anyone. She had ended him, the way it should have been. Family takes care of family.

"When the time comes, it should be you," she said to the red-bearded man.

He looked at her, horror in his eyes. "Excuse me?"

"If they turn, make sure you're the one that does it. You know what I mean?"

The man didn't say anything else. He propelled his children to the back of the other line. Katie smiled and waved at the children. They did not reciprocate.

Katie turned her attention to the line in front of her. At least she'd get her meal faster this way. The trailer was pumping out plates of food at an alarming pace. Katie wished they would have given out more packaged food, something that would last a while in an emergency, but food was food, even though the stuff they were ladling out didn't seem all that appetizing to her.

With her mind lost in thought, she stepped up to the counter, and a woman in fatigues plopped a tray in front of her. First, there was a scoop of mashed potatoes, likely from some dehydrated source. Then there was an unappetizing piece of breaded meat topped with another ladleful of gravy. Next was a scoop of mixed vegetables, carrots, peas, and corn that all had that shrunken look that comes from being dehydrated. Finally, she was given a dinner roll with some sort of butter substitute in a tiny golden package. It was followed with a bottle of water, which Katie was a little upset with. The rest of the meal brought about the nostalgia of meals long ago at her elementary school in Vermont. The only thing missing was an 8 oz. carton of 2% milk.

Katie stepped out of line with the Styrofoam tray in her hand. She was looking at the meal in front of her, wondering what she was going to eat first when a voice spoke at her side. "Nothing like the old armed forces to put a little meat on your bones in the cheapest, most flavorless manner possible. Am I right?"

Katie broke out of her culinary contemplation and looked at the man who had spoke. He was an older gentleman, with a mean look about his eyes, but a kind bent to his mouth."

"Yeah. At least I didn't have to make it myself," she said.

"Amen to that." The man plopped his bottle of water onto his tray, and held out his now freed up hand. "My name's Zeke."

Katie shook the man's proffered hand and smiled, "I'm sorry."

"For what?" the man said.

"That you've been stuck with that stupid name for your entire life."

The man laughed, a deep hearty laugh that echoed throughout the concourse. It was a dusty sounding laugh, as if that register of his throat hadn't been used in years. "Yeah. I'm sorry too." They stood there for a moment, experiencing a brief moment of awkward silence before Zeke said, "Are you here with people?"

Katie shook her head, the truth too raw and unpredictable to be allowed to cross her lips. "Well, would you like to eat with us?" he continued.

"Us?" Katie asked. The man with the mean eyes pointed to a man who was waiting by an entrance to the arena, an impatient look on his smooth, almost baby-like face. "Oh, I don't..."

Zeke interrupted her and said, "I'm not asking you out on a date, lady. I'm just trying to have some dinner and some conversation."

Katie felt relieved and somewhat disappointed. Maybe she would like a date. Maybe she would like a little time to forget the last 24 hours, but the man had said he wasn't interested... but maybe that was just to cover up the fact that he was interested. Men were seldom "not interested," even when they pretended as if they weren't. Jason had been much the same when they first started going out... Jason.

"I would love to join you," she said, hoping that dinner with the man and his friend would allow her to shake the sadness out of her mind, or at the very least smash it down into the background long enought to give her a break. Plus, it looked like the man could handle himself if it came down to it. He had the sort of physique that spoke of a lifetime of being fit. There was a little relaxation and normalcy laced over the top of it, but he had the rough thick hands of a man who could handle himself when the shit hit the fan. She needed people like that. Dread continued to gnaw at the nape of her neck, trying to claw its way inside her mind where it could explode into full-fledged panic.

The man smiled at her, "Right this way, lady."

Katie followed.

Chapter 20: Polite Conversation

Zeke didn't know why he decided to speak to the woman. She had that hollow look about her, that look that he'd seen soldiers get after something unspeakable happened. Shell-shock some called it, though the public had decided to give it an entirely more P.C. name. Zeke preferred shell-shock to PTSD. He had no time for acronyms. Whatever you decided to call it, the woman had that look about her. The look tugged at something inside him, something that he had long thought was dead. Here was a situation that he could do something about. Instead of just sitting in the bleachers and eating his traditional military meal, he could actually do something useful. The surprising part about it was that he wanted to. Compassion was something that he had thought he had lost underneath the hot sun of foreign lands.

When Louis had decided to draw the dead away from Brian and his family on the waterfront, something had awakened in Zeke, something he had long ago buried. While they sat in the courtyard of the Coliseum stripping naked to show they weren't bitten, he had thought about the person that he had become over the last decade. For all intents and purposes, he had been committing suicide. His house, small and utilitarian, was to be his tomb. He sat inside it, eating, drinking, and polishing his guns, waiting for the day that he wouldn't wake up.

Zeke's time in the military had been unremarkable for the most part. It was standard-issue. He had seen death in many shapes and forms, from the anonymous type to the up close and personal type. Somewhere along the way he had closed up shop. Now he found that the shop was open, and though the items were covered in a layer of dust, they were still useful; people still wanted and needed them. He would give them, free of charge.

They hiked into the arena, holding their trays steady and climbing high, so they could have a good vantage point and avoid the crowd of refugees below. Most of them sat slumped in the arena's seats. Some were lying on the floor, their heads buried in their arms. Some sobbed, their hands buried in their faces.

"Lady, this is Louis," Zeke said, introducing the man that he had gone through hell with. Zeke's legs were tight, his lower back felt like an alien was trying to erupt out of it, and he hadn't been that out of shape to begin with. How Louis was still walking around was a mystery to him.

"Louis, this is..." Zeke waited for the lady to say her name, but none was forthcoming. "This is Lady."

"Pleased to meet you," Louis said over his shoulder as he limped up the concrete stairs to a spot that was relatively devoid of other inhabitants. He side-shuffled a few seats into the narrow row of plastic seats, and plopped down, a great sigh escaping from his lips. Louis was exhausted, and Zeke knew that he would pass out soon.

The woman sat down, her curly brown hair wild but ultimately attractive. Her clothing screamed "mom" to Zeke, her delicate un-toned hands and the pale ring of skin around her left ring finger spoke of tragedy. He wouldn't press the situation. She seemed nice enough. She most likely needed someone to talk to, and Zeke could tell that Louis was not long for consciousness. Even before he ate his food, Louis bent down and stripped off his shoes, sighing in relief as he pulled off the second boot.

"You got anyone else here with you?" Zeke asked before spooning a forkful of once-dehydrated vegetables in his mouth. They were flavorless, and still hard in spots, but after years of eating them, Zeke didn't mind. When he looked at the woman, he saw that she was struggling to find a way to answer. He had started off with the wrong question.

Trying to move past the awkwardness, Zeke said, "Me and Louis here had one hell of a ride into this place. Didn't we, Louis?" Louis nodded his head, his eyes droopy, as he forked a glob of mashed potatoes into his mouth. "Yeah, we got picked up in a boat with that guy over there." Zeke pointed to Brian and his two daughters, Ruby and Jane. They sat away from everyone else, the oldest daughter picking at her food while the youngest cried softly. The father had his arm around her, but he stared off into space, his mind somewhere else. Zeke felt for the man.

He dropped his voice and said, "When the military stopped us, they executed his wife. She had been bitten, so he's a little... well, you know how it is." The woman looked at him, a quirk of a smile on her lips. She had that same far-off look that was clinging to Brian's face. Shit, he thought, I did it again.

In a monotone voice, the lady said, "We have to get out of here."

Zeke laughed. He had been thinking the same thing. The defenses were good, if you were guarding against humans, creatures that feared for their lives and could be incapacitated. The dead outside knew no fear. Those piddly chain-link fences were no match for the press of dead flesh. Zeke and Louis had seen that first-hand at the tenement they had escaped from... and those had been wrought-iron fences set into a concrete base. "Ain't that the truth, lady."

"Do you have a plan? You seem like the type of guy that can handle himself. I don't want to be caught in here when it goes bad." The lady began forking the food into her mouth after speaking. It was as if articulating the words out loud had made the situation real and kicked her into high-gear.

Zeke laughed. "Always be prepared. You must have been a Boy Scout when you were a kid."

With a mouth full of breaded meat and gravy, the lady said, "Nope... I was a Brownie? So what's your big plan? A man like you must have a plan."

"The plan? The plan is to rest up and be ready to move when it all goes down."

The lady ate another bite of food, her delicate, soft-hands seeming out of step with the look in her eyes. She had the look of stubborn survival, undercut with a side of grief. It was an old look, not the sort of thing you'd expect to see on a housewife's face. Without having to ask, Zeke knew her story. Her family was dead, and she was shuffling on. Had she lost a husband? Kids? More than that? It didn't matter. Zeke had no one to lose. He could be strong enough for her, if she would let him.

"How do you think it's going to happen?" the lady said.

Zeke leaned back against the hard, plastic seat, raising his arms above his head and stretching. He pulled his sealed bottle of water off the floor, unscrewed the top and tipped it back. "I think that when it happens, it's going to happen fast. There will be chaos, and that's when we have to make our move. Without a vehicle, we don't get out of here. Without weapons, food and water, even if we get out of here, we'll only be able to survive for a few days at most."

Zeke pressed the side of the fork to the mystery meat on his plate, separating a bite-sized piece with minimal pressure and popping it into his mouth. "When it goes down, we'll know it's going down. In the meantime, eat, drink, be merry, save your water bottles and keep them filled. We'll keep someone on watch at the front of the Coliseum. When things go south, we'll all get out of here together."

"What about weapons?"

Zeke swallowed his meat, salt and grease clinging to his throat like desperation. "Look around. Everything is a weapon. The key is to keep them off of you. Killing them is good, but keeping them off of you so you can escape is just as good if not better."

"How many people do you have going on this little field trip of yours?"

"Well, there's me and my man Louis over here." Zeke was about to slap Louis on the arm, but he saw that Louis had finally fallen asleep. His tray leaned precariously on his lap, so Zeke picked it up as gently as he could and set it on the concrete ground. "Then we've got those guys over there as well," he said, pointing towards Brian.

The lady turned her head and looked at them. The look on her face let Zeke know that she wasn't thrilled that they were being included in the package. "Seriously? Kids?"

Zeke took a sip from his water bottle and nodded his head, as if there would be no negotiating.

"What makes you think you can keep those kids alive?"

"I can't. But there's vehicles out there that can. You ever heard of a Stryker?" Zeke asked.

"You mean like someone goes on strike? My husband almost went on strike last year." Zeke didn't know what she was going to say next, but whatever it was it caught in her throat and would not come out.

Zeke thought it best to forge ahead, so he said, "Yeah, well, a Stryker is an armored personnel carrier. They call it an APC in the military. It's pretty much impervious, runs on eight wheels, and can withstand all sorts of small arms fire. It's got room for ten. We get those kids in there, and we should be able to get out of the city. So what do you say? You want to come with us?"

The lady looked over her shoulder again, eyeing the kids. Disgust was etched on her face, and something else. That's when Zeke knew that she had lost more than her husband. She had lost it all.

The lady looked back at him and said, "If it comes down to me or those kids, I'm not saving them. You got that?"

She had lost everything, including her compassion. Zeke knew the feeling. Hopefully, he could help her find it again. "They're not your responsibility. No one can make them your responsibility."

The lady locked eyes with him. Brown eyes, clear as glass, not a speck of madness in them. "If those kids get bit, someone better take them down. Or else I will."

Zeke didn't have much to say to that. He knew that there were dead children out there, faces pressed against the chain-link fences. The idea of having to kill one of them had never crossed his mind. The idea of having to kill a living child on the verge of turning made his skin crawl. Putting a gun to the head of an adult trying to feed on you was one thing, putting the gun to the head of a child that you could hold at arm's length was another.

"You understand?" the lady said.

Zeke nodded his head, and then the sadness flooded into her eyes, the logical, cold-blooded part of her, diluted by the cut of grief. She pulled a tiny bottle of wine from her purse, unscrewed the aluminum cap and took a sip. She held it out to Zeke. He shrugged his shoulders and took it from her. It tasted like acidic grape juice. It wasn't a PBR, but it would do the job.

"Good, now I don't feel like such an alcoholic."

"That makes two of us."

For the first time, the lady smiled, lips parting like clouds, teeth like rays of sunshine. He would help this lady, if she would let him.

Chapter 21: When is Check Out Time?

Mort tried to hold onto his lunch throughout the chopper ride. He had never been in an airplane, let alone a helicopter. His ears still rang, but it was a damn sight better than it had been. On the rooftop, he had tried to help Blake get to his feet, so that they could move away from the fire, but Blake had been useless, even after his eyes had opened. His first few seconds of blinking didn't uncross his eyes, and as Mort helped the man to his feet, he had doubled over and vomited, falling to the ground like a drunk.

Mort had barely noticed the sound of the thumping rotors of the helicopter as it hovered over them, turning the smoke from the burning thrift shop into roiling shapes that looked like waves. Blood dripped from Blake's ears, and Mort waved at the pilot, who sat behind the controls, looking down at them through the dark lenses of his helmet. He seemed more like a terrifying insect than an actual human.

When the helicopter swung to the side, Mort shielded his eyes from the wind that sent the tiny pebbles and loose rocks that covered the roof flying. The side of the helicopter slid open and two soldiers hopped out. They yelled at him, but over the noise of the helicopter, Mort couldn't make out their words.

He stood there, trying to read their lips, shouting back and forth. The soldier on the left held up his arm and pretended to bite it, then he pointed at Mort and Blake, who was lying on the ground his arm over his face. Mort understood what the man was asking, and he shook his head, yelling, "We aren't bitten," as loud as he could. "It was an explosion!" he screamed. The man nodded, and turned around, giving the pilot a thumbs up from where he watched the proceedings in the cockpit.

The soldiers lowered their weapons and helped Blake up off the ground. They dragged him to the hovering helicopter, and helped him into it. The best he could manage was to lie across the floor, the tips of his cowboy boots pointing up into the air. Once Blake was situated, the soldiers turned to Mort and waved for him to get on the helicopter. Mort bent down and picked up the bag with all of their weapons in it.

Immediately, the larger soldier held out the palm of his hands and gestured for Mort to stop. He demanded to the see the bag and Mort handed it over reluctantly. The soldier went through the bag, and from the soldier's body language, he could tell that it was no longer his. When he was done inspecting the bag's contents, the soldier gave the pilot a thumbs up. Mort climbed into the helicopter, and they lifted into the air.

Now he was trying to keep his lunch down. If it wasn't for Blake, he would have taken the guns and let the helicopter leave him on the roof, but Blake was hurt bad. The man had saved him, the least he could do was endure the presence of some authority until he was sure that Blake was alright. It was the code of the homeless. You didn't owe anyone anything, until they showed you kindness. Blake had showed him kindness. He owed it back. Maybe there was a doctor where they were going.

The helicopter slowed to a hover over a rooftop, and the two soldiers in the back rappelled onto the roof.  Slowing down somehow made his nausea even worse. Mort watched as the soldiers went through the same pantomime that Mort had gone through with a family of people clinging to the shingles of a roof. Mort took a risk and leaned out over the edge of the helicopter. Beneath them, the dead had gathered, their arms stretched to the sky as if they could climb the air to get at their prey. The world began to rock from side to side in his head, as if he had had too much whiskey, and he fell back and gripped the edge of his seat, cold sweat sprouting over every inch of his body. Mort was not a fan of heights.

The family was sitting on the peak of a two-story house. Outside, the soldiers were having a heated discussion on the pitched roof. Mort couldn't catch the words that they were saying, but the man buried his hands in his face, briefly, and then hugged his kids and his wife. With that, the soldiers ushered the wife and children to the helicopter. Mort helped lift them into the helicopter, where they sat, tears running down their faces. The soldiers climbed on board, and though Mort didn't want to look, he did. On the roof, the man waved at his children, his face becoming smaller and smaller. Below him, the hordes continued trying to climb the sky. The man sat heavily on the shingles of the roof, his hands over his face as the chopper flew through the sky, packed with survivors and heavy emotions. Even after they were out of sight of the man, he could still see the look on his face and the small trickle of blood running from his forearm.

They sped through the evening sky, and Mort was thankful for the thumping of the rotors and the roar of the wind, as it drowned out the noises of the grieving children who clung to their mother, her arms too busy being wrapped around their shoulders to stem the tide of tears pouring down her own face.

As they flew through the city, Mort fantasized about stealing the helicopter and flying it to someplace better than the refugee camp that the soldiers assured him was safe. He would take it and fly it to the ocean. It had been a while since he had seen a beach, and there were certainly likely to be less of those things out there. What were they? Were they completely dead? Did they still have memories? There were so many questions and too few answers, but in the end, the only real question was would they survive? Mort closed his eyes so he wouldn't have to see the sad faces across from him.

The rhythm of the helicopter's whirring rotor threatened to lull him to sleep, but before that could happen, they were touching down on the ground. Mort helped Blake to his feet, and they managed to get him out of the helicopter. Before they could even take a few steps, the helicopter was off into the sky. In its absence, the silence seemed louder than the helicopter; then he realized that the soldiers were yelling at him. He could make out the words above the ringing in his ears, but only barely.

"He needs help!" he yelled to the soldiers. They either didn't hear him or didn't care.

"Put him down," they yelled, "and strip!" As soon as the family was ushered away to a more private location, Mort helped the barely conscious Blake sit on the ground, and he did as he was told. His dirty body gleamed in the spotlights, and he twirled around so they could see that he wasn't bitten.

One soldier stepped up close to him, pointed to the cuts on Mort's forehead, and asked, "How did that happen?"

I used my head to bash through the window of a cop car, he thought. "I jumped through a window."

"None of those things got you?" the soldier asked.

"Wouldn't be here if they did," Mort said.

The soldier looked at Blake on the ground. "What about him? What's his story?"

"He got his bell rung by an explosion. He needs a doctor."

"He bit?" the soldier asked.

"He wouldn't be here if he was, would he?"

The soldier looked at Mort, and then made up his mind, pointing in a general direction. "There's a triage center back there."

"Thanks," Mort said as he lifted Blake off the ground. Mort limped in the direction of the Coliseum, his throbbing knee of little concern.

"Where are we?" Blake managed to mutter, before his head drooped to his chest.

Mort surveyed his surroundings. He didn't like what he saw. Pale fingers, the flesh rubbed and scratched off of them, curled through the tiny diamonds of the chain-link fence surrounding the Coliseum. Faces devoid of color, with the exception of crimson blood, pressed against the fence, as if they could simply push their way through. There were too many for Mort to count. A clock started ticking in his head. His survival instincts kicked in, and he knew that it would only be a matter of time until the fences came down. He had to get Blake looked at before it was too late to check out.

Chapter 22: The Last Show on Earth

Sunlight poured into the back of the Turtle through the turret above. They were all calling it the Turtle now. Ace and his three surviving men threaded their way through the city in the Turtle. Their numbers had swelled somewhat after they had destroyed the helicopter. A handful of survivors had run out to them, waving guns in the air. They were not the sort of folk that appreciated such things as "martial law."

Beer flowed in the back of the vehicle as Ace strummed his electric guitar. He had liberated it from Beelzebub's after the crash, along with his amplifier. The Turtle was too confined for him to plug it in, and playing the guitar without massive amounts of distortion was something of a turnoff.

The others talked while Ace strummed, waiting for the next opportunity for chaos. Slutty Rivets drove the vehicle, with Spider in the front passenger seat. Pudge was in the back with Ace, making nice with their new passengers. He seemed relieved not to be stuck with only Ace to talk to. Ace listened to their conversation in the back of his mind while he played his favorite song "Death and Gasoline" on his guitar.

"So you guys were just hiding in your apartment building the whole time?" Pudge asked, goofy disbelief in his words.

A man with a thick gray beard nodded his head and said, "Yeah. We didn't know what we were going to do. I guess we thought about just sticking it out and hoping the military would handle it. When we saw you guys take out that helicopter, we knew the military wasn't going to be able to do shit."

"Have you guys heard anything about other parts of the country?" Pudge asked.

The man reached down and pulled a can of beer out of a bag. He popped the top and took a sip, drops of beer falling from his mustache to hang in his gray beard. "Ain't you guys seen the news?"

Pudge shook his head. "We were locked up last night."

The man with the gray beard just shook his head as if he couldn't believe the words that were coming out of his mouth. "It's all over, man. They got this shit in D.C., New York. Hell, they even got it over in Japan."

Ace missed his fingering. Whether it was because of what the man said or because Slutty Rivets had just run over a bump in the road, he couldn't say. He wouldn't say. Not even to himself.

"It's happening everywhere?"

The bearded man shook his head. "Ain't no place safe, not in town, not outside of town. The only place that is safe would be the Coliseum. There's a station on the radio been broadcasting some nonsense about a rescue camp, but it's all nonsense, just government hooey to get us all to come out of our homes and get ourselves killed."

"Why would they do that?" Pudge asked.

The bearded man took a sip from his beer and smiled. "Overpopulation, my friend. There's just too many damn people, not enough jobs, not enough space. Hell, you think the government didn't know about this shit? You think they didn't know that there was a virus out there that could turn people into the living dead? They probably invented it! They probably have the cure out there right now, and they're holding onto it until enough of us have died. By then, there won't be enough of us to do anything about it. And if they do decide to save us, even after all of this mess, the people will probably still thank them."

Ace smiled down at his guitar. He could see the bearded man's words seep into the other passengers' brains, burrowing deeper, like the roots of a tree, threatening to crack their brains apart as the roots thickened  and the ideas gained more and more credence. They wanted answers, and a bearded man drinking a beer was giving them one. Though the answers were ridiculous and worthy of derision, they wanted one so badly that they were willing to accept even the most foolish answer given. Ace thanked the bearded man in his mind.

"I don't like this government," Ace said.

The passengers looked at Ace, a skinny man in a leather jacket, dark sunglasses covering his eyes, and his arm draped over an electric guitar. He had been quiet for the whole ride, so when he spoke they listened. Even Slutty Rivets and Spider in the front of the vehicle stopped their chattering.

"I think this man is right," Ace continued, pointing at the bearded man. "But I also think the time for talk is gone. Now, today, we need actions. Who are they protecting in this Coliseum? You?" Ace pointed at the man with the gray beard.

"Nah, man," he replied.

"You?" Ace pointed at Pudge.

"Do I look protected?"

"So who are they protecting? They didn't protect me. When you were hiding, trapped inside, they didn't protect you. They protect themselves. They have the way to stop all of this, but they are not using it."

Ace let his words sink into his passengers' brains, planting more roots, creeping, crawling roots.

"They hide in this place, this Coliseum, waiting for us to die."

The passengers' faces were angry now. The roots were swelling in their brains, pushing logic to the side, cracking reality, and casting Ace in a new light.

"I say it's time to take it back. If they won't protect us, then we must protect ourselves."

"Right on," the gray-bearded man yelled. Others joined in, echoing his sentiment.

Pudge straightened his glasses and looked up at Ace, who was now standing, fever hanging on his lips. "How do we do that?"

"If they want refugees, then we will bring them refugees." Ace looked down at his guitar and smiled. "We're going to put on a little concert. It's the last show on earth, boys and girls. And you're all invited."

Chapter 23: Droppin' Like Flies

The Annies were drawn by the helicopters. McCutcheon knew that. The Annies did not sleep. McCutcheon knew that. The Annies wanted to eat live flesh. McCutcheon knew that as well. What McCutcheon didn't know was that the Annies could have such a demoralizing effect on soldiers that had been hardened by years of service overseas.

These were men that had seen and done things that most civilians could only begin to imagine. Yet, within the last four hours, he had received note of several suicides, a major outbreak in the base, and one notice of an entire chopper crew going AWOL, in addition to the ones that they had lost earlier in the day.

McCutcheon could understand the chopper crew. They had the means, they had the chance, and they were now gone, and there was no way to get them back. He envied them. If he could get away with it, he would probably try to make his way back to Colorado and find his wife and daughter.

What he couldn't understand were the men and women who killed themselves in their bunks. They found one man hanging from a pipe in the bathrooms, his legs jittering and kicking as if he were alive. He wasn't though, as the two men had found out when they attempted to cut him down. You couldn't blame them for trying to save him. It was an unfortunate situation, but the reality was that one man's selfish act had led to a mass panic resulting in the death of a couple hundred soldiers.

After they had dispatched the suicidal soldier and all the victims of the outbreak, McCutcheon had to deal with an even worse problem. Two soldiers had been bitten during the outbreak, and he had them quarantined. He gave them one hour to get their affairs in order while a soldier stood guard over them, a rifle in hand. When their time was up, he collected their letters, saluted the men, and put the gun to their heads himself. They had only been bitten, but this was the protocol now, immediate termination of the compromised. Kill 'em, he thought. Simple bites and scratches had ended these men's lives. Before they could turn, he had ended theirs.

McCutcheon wasn't mad. It was all just a matter of understanding reality. The reality was that outside of the perimeter, there were thousands of dead, honing in on their own encampment. Whether they knew they were there or whether they were simply following the helicopters didn't matter. The end result was the same. Outside of the camp, the dead gathered, their faces pressed against the fence. Men, women, and children of the United States of America, were now his number one enemy, and they were loud.

The Terminal was filled with the constant buzz of their moaning and sighing. The noise seemed to cut through every sort of barrier that he had put between himself and the milling masses. It was a plaintive sound, one that found its way inside a man's brain and rattled around, until all you could think about were the thousands of decaying corpses that were pressed up against the Terminal's fortifications. He understood why a man would kill himself after listening to it for hours. Their situation seemed hopeless, and to be honest, McCutcheon's number one concern was no longer saving Portland, Oregon. It was now to do right by the soldiers under his command. They were outnumbered, they were under-supplied and understaffed... and they were falling apart.

People were slipping away, either by disappearing or by killing themselves. Something had to be done, but what?

McCutcheon sat in his chair, the voices of the dead threading through his mind and turning his thoughts dark. The latest soldier to kill himself had done a poor job of it. Slit wrists, followed by a crazy stumble through camp, during which he had latched onto several people, some of whom would later wind up locked in a room writing their final words to someone they loved, who may or may not be alive or dead. At least the first guy had the common decency to hang himself and prevent his corpse from wandering all over the damn Terminal.

McCutcheon sat up in his chair and pawed through the letters, his fingers still reeking of gunpowder. He hoped he wouldn't have to shoot anyone else that day. The letters were sappy, showed little creativity, and were utterly heartbreaking in their simplicity. He stuffed the letters into a manila envelope and left it unsealed. There would be more. He knew that, and it wasn't like the damn post office was running anymore. He tossed the envelope on his desk and walked over to the coffee machine in the corner.

Some of the communications officers were there, talking in hushed tones, their faces gray and ashen.

"What's the word, men?"

Neither of the men could look him in the eye. That was not a good thing.

McCutcheon grabbed the coffee pot, and dumped some mud into his cup. For a second, he thought about just drinking the coffee black for the men's sake, but only a maniac would let the army's supernatural coffee concoction slide down their throat without a dose of sugar or cream. He grabbed the powdered creamer on the counter, and dumped it into his cup, followed by one plain white packet of sugar.

He could feel the communications officers watching him out of the corner of his eye. He stirred the coffee with a plain white swizzle stick, and when he couldn't stand their staring anymore, he said, "What is it?"

The stockier of the two communications officers looked at him and stammered out a reply. "We were just talking about contingency plans, sir."

McCutcheon laughed without looking at the men. "Oh, really? And what did you two geniuses come up with, all on your own?"

The taller communications officer spoke. "We were just wondering when the mission would be called. I mean we've made almost no ground so far and..."

McCutcheon stopped stirring his coffee and turned to face the men. "Stop right there, private. Your first mistake was talking in the first place. Your second mistake was trying to figure out something that is far beyond your pay grade. But your biggest mistake is walking around here flapping your gums about contingency plans."

McCutcheon grabbed his cup of coffee and tossed it into the metal sink. He slammed the coffee cup on the counter and looked the tall man in the eye, boring a hole into his head with his stare. "You want out of here? Huh?" The men said nothing, their eyes large and round. "There are three ways out of here, private. One, you die. Two, you drop your shit and walk out of here, and you die alone. Three, you stop your sniveling, you get back on those comms, and you help us start winning this war."

McCutcheon strode up to the tall man, and though the comms officer had some six inches on him, McCutcheon could feel him shrink with every syllable. "Now get your ass back on those comms, and if I hear any more of your uninformed suppositions about tactics, you'll find yourself hiking home through Annie territory with nothing but your dick in your hand. You got that?"

"Sir, yes, sir." The communications officer saluted McCutcheon and turned on his heel, heading back to the small room where all of the communications equipment had been set up. The smaller communications officer did the same, and when they had both disappeared, McCutcheon set about the business of redoing his coffee, which he had only dumped purely for theatrical reasons.

It was worse than he thought. The men were squirrelly, he could feel it. The two communications officers weren't just discussing contingency plans. They were feeling out the situation, testing his mettle, seeing if any cracks were forming in his resolve. This was how it went. This was why they were doomed.

In a normal confrontation on foreign soil, this situation never happened. Soldiers did not simply drop their rifle and walk off into foreign lands. But they weren't in a foreign land. These men were home, their boots firmly walking on the dirt that they had each vowed to protect. Home was a stolen car away, and at the rate they were going, there wouldn't be an Army to bring them back in. First came the talk of contingency plans. Then came the talk of disappearing. Then came the outright defiance and a broken chain of command. McCutcheon was fairly sure that there was nothing he could do about any of this. The ball was dropping. He could either get out of the way or get crushed by it.

"Fuck," McCutcheon said as he took a sip of mud. "Not enough sugar."

Chapter 24: Barbarians at the Gate

The first thing that Murph saw on the camera was the busted gate lying on the ground, entangled in the wheels of a pick-up truck. The gate had been a black iron thing that had always looked out of place. It was the type of gate that seemed more appropriate for a mansion than a power plant. The gate was affixed to a couple of concrete guard shacks. As long as Murph could remember, there had never been any guards at the power plant, just a magnetic reader that scanned their work badges. Now the gate was twisted underneath the truck, while the guard shack itself was caved in by the front fender of the pick-up truck. He had no idea how long the truck had been there because he had no idea how long he had been lost in the hypnotic glow of the boiler.

The doors to the truck were wide open, as if someone had fled the scene, and black exhaust still erupted from the truck's muffler. Bodies lay scattered about the desert ground, apparently thrown from the back of the pick-up in the collision. Sitting behind the wheel was a slumped form. Murph recognized the bony forearms immediately, even over the grainy camera footage. It was Skinny Tom. What the fuck was he doing?

Murph watched as the form behind the steering wheel sat up and slid from the driver's seat. It stumbled drunkenly, and Murph could see that Skinny Tom was injured. The fingers of his right hand were missing, but he didn't seem to notice. Then Murph saw another form climb out of the cab of the truck, a little boy, his arm dripping blood and a blank look on his face that was a perfect match for the look plastered across Skinny Tom's face. On the black and white monitor, it looked as if the boy's overalls had been stained in oil, but Murph was certain it was more blood.

The figures that had been thrown from the truck began to move. They must have been packed into the back of the pick-up like sardines. There were ten that Murph could see. He watched as Skinny Tom knelt next to a woman whose forehead was bleeding. He wrapped his arms around her and pulled her close, as if for a hug. Then her arms began to flail in the air, her head thrown back and her mouth wide open. Murph couldn't hear the scream, but it felt as if he could.

Murph grabbed his radio, pressed the button and said, "Chief, we got a problem out at the main gate."

"What kind of problem?" the Chief replied.

"There's been some sort of accident. Skinny Tom and a bunch of other people I don't know. I think they might be some of them."

"Alright, I'm checking it out."

"You want me to come down there?" Murph asked.

"No, you stay put. Don't leave that room for nothing."

"You got it." Murph punched up the loading dock and watched as the Chief ground out his cigarette and walked over to the cab of his own truck, a beat-up old Mazda, low to the ground and covered in rust. He leaned into the cab of the open window, and pulled out a hunting rifle. He flung it over his shoulder, pulled a cigarette out of his pocket, lit it, and took off jogging down the road, leaving a trail of smoke behind him.

Murph switched the monitor to the front gate and tried to figure out who was alive and who was dead. After a couple of seconds, it wasn't so hard to figure out... because they were all dead, except for one, a teenage boy, his Chuck Taylor's kicking up dust as he looked for a way out of the circle of dead that were closing in on him. He climbed onto the hood of the truck, and kicked at their pawing hands.

The Chief appeared, his rifle in his hands, and his back to the camera, a cigarette still hanging out of his mouth. He raised the rifle to his eye, and there was a flash. Skinny Tom flinched and turned around, blood running down the front of his chest. The Chief's first shot had entered his back and erupted out of his chest, turning his shirt into a dark mess. His attention was now drawn to the Chief along with a couple other of the dead.

The Chief used the bolt action on his rifle to eject the spent shell casing and drive another round into the chamber. Then he looked down the sights of the gun. There was another flash, and this time Murph saw the back of Skinny Tom's head explode, showering the dead behind him in more dark spots. Skinny Tom fell to the ground.

Murph felt relief as the Chief began putting the dead down, one by one, the teenage boy still kicking and shoving them away from the hood of the truck. Murph's relief was short-lived however, as the boy slipped on a spot of blood on the truck's slick hood and fell to the ground. The Chief worked feverishly, firing, operating the bolt on his gun, and firing again, all to no avail. The boy was gone, torn to shreds by the three remaining dead who had pounced on him the moment he had fallen to the dusty ground.

The Chief sighted down his rifle one more time and pulled the trigger, but this time there was no flash. He let the muzzle of the rifle droop to the ground, and then the Chief backed away. In the distance, Murph could see more people approaching down the main road... slowly, ever so slowly.

Before the teenage boy in the Chuck Taylor's could rise from the ground, the first of the walkers had arrived... he was just as dead as the others.

Chapter 25: Take Two of These and Call Me in the Morning

The black man hovered over his friend, getting in the way and asking questions whose answers he probably wouldn't understand. He was dirtier than dirty, and Joan made him wash his hands before he could even step foot into the triage area. He had come in carrying a dazed white man with blood leaking out of his ears. They were covered in filth, looked exhausted, and their skin was a patchwork of bruises that made her hurt just looking at them.

The white man sat before her, his eyes distant and dazed. "What's your name?"

He looked at her, uncomprehending. She looked into his eyes, pulling out a penlight she had snagged from the head medical officer. She shined them into his eyes, taking note of the dilation.

"Can you hear me?" she asked. She snapped her fingers next to his ear, and frowned at his lack of a reaction.

"His name is Blake. He saved me."

"Blake, can you hear anything I'm saying?" she said as loud as she could.

The man in front of her frowned and shook his head. "I can't hear what you're saying," he said.

Joan pulled an otoscope from the wall, attached a disposable plastic tip to it, and leaned in to look at his ears. It wasn't good. Blake's eardrums were ruptured, far beyond what she could fix. Normally, they would heal with time or with the help of a little surgery, but this was not the place to be doing such a procedure. Joan pulled a notepad from her pocket and wrote on it.

She held the pad out to Blake, he focused his eyes on it, and then his head dropped.

"What does it say?" Mort asked.

She held the notepad out to him, and his lips moved as he read the words. "He's deaf? Is he going to get better? Will it heal?"

"Not on its own. The rupture is too large in both ears."

Mort let the words sink in. He couldn't imagine what Blake must be feeling. This new world was not the type of world you wanted to be living in without the ability to hear. Mort put his hand on Blake's shoulder as a sign of comfort. Blake looked up at him, smiled and shrugged. "It ain't all bad," he said. "Now I never have to hear the Dave Matthews Band on the radio." Blake smiled at Mort.

Mort didn't know what to do, so he just smiled back.

Joan wrote more words on the notepad and handed it to Blake. He read the words solemnly, as she filled in his friend. "Your friend has a concussion. He needs to get plenty of rest, which I know is a tough order to fill right now, but if he's going to survive, he's going to need plenty of rest." Joan opened a drawer and pulled out a bottle of military grade acetaminophen in a nondescript white bottle. "This should help with the headaches that you both undoubtedly have. My advice? Go grab some food, find a cot, and rest up."

"Thanks, Doc," the black man said. "My name's Mort. We appreciate it." He held out his hand to her, and Joan shook it gracefully.

"I'm Joan. Oh, and here. Why don't you take this, you'll probably need it." Joan handed Mort the notepad and the pen. He shoved it into the large pocket of his secondhand military jacket and then had Blake throw an arm over his shoulder. As he bent down, he winced at the pain in his knee.

"You ok?" Joan asked.

Mort shook his head. "It's nothing, just hurt my knee a bit."

Joan shook her head. Men, they were always the same. Even in the midst of an apocalypse, they refused to take care of themselves. Joan patted the table, and said, "Get up here. Let's take a look."

"No, it's nothing, Doc. I got it covered."

"Stop being a stubborn shit, and get your ass on that table."

Blake stood up and wobbled over to a small chair in the corner, holding onto the bottle of painkillers. "Well, since you put it that way," he said. Mort flopped on the table, sighing as he laid down. Joan pulled his pant leg up and sighed in frustration as she looked at Mort's swollen knee.

"How the hell have you been walking around on this thing?"

"Ain't had no choice. Out there, it's either move or die. I'm not much into dying."

Joan pressed on the knee, testing it. She made him bend it and flex it. She sighed. "You're damn lucky. I don't think there's anything structurally wrong with it, but if you keep pushing it, it's going to get worse, and you'll injure it further. So," Joan pointed back and forth at both of them, "the two of you need to drag your butts down to get some food, find some cots, take three of those pills, and get as much rest as you can. You, grab some ice. It'll help reduce the swelling in your knee and his head."

"Sure thing, Doc."

"And if I see you two up and walking around, I'm going to have those soldiers strap you down to your cots and make sure you get the rest you need. Got that?"

Mort shook his head and got up off the table. He gave Blake a shoulder to lean on and they disappeared from the room. Joan plopped down in the chair that Blake had vacated. What was she doing? The end of the world was out there and here she was playing doctor. She supposed she just enjoyed being needed. In here, she was still relevant, still important. Out in the real world, she was a liability, a brain without the ability to take care of itself. She was dead meat walking on her own, amongst the other dead meat.

She leaned forward and put her head in her hands. The tears came, for the first time, and they came with force. The tears were laced with a fear that she could taste in her mouth, metallic and sharp. The prospect of her own death flooded her brain, and she began to think about what a waste her entire life had been. She had worked hard to become a doctor, and then, once she had become a doctor, that's all she had done. There was no family, no friends, just work, some acquaintances, and a cat that seemed altogether indifferent to her.

Thoughts of her cat stuck in her apartment sent a new wave of sobbing through her. She wanted to kick her feet and scream and roll on the floor, but she didn't; she just sat in her chair smashing her hands into her face to hide the shame of her emotional breakdown. Fuck it. She had earned it.

"So you are human," a voice said.

Joan couldn't even pull her hands down to look at Clara. Another sob tore through her body. She felt awful acting this way. So many people had lost so much more than her, and yet here she was wailing like a baby, and now Clara was seeing it all.

Then there was an arm on her shoulder, comforting her. Somehow, that made it even worse. Clara, who had lost her soulmate, was comforting Joan who had lost nothing but the status of being a doctor and a cat. Joan laid her head on Clara's breast and the sobs came, along with the tears and the snot. She wanted to stop, but she couldn't. Her arms reached around Clara, grabbing handfuls of her shirt, and together they sat in a room in the underground of the Memorial Coliseum, while above them the dead milled about, searching for a way to get at all the living people inside.

When the sobbing had subsided, Joan lifted her head, her eyes red, her nose runny, and said, "I'm sorry. I don't know why I'm crying."

Clara smiled at her and said, "It's ok. I know why."

"Sure you do?"

"Yeah. I do. You're crying because it's all going away. Change is hard, and though these changes are fucked up and crazy, what it comes down to is that this is all basically just change. We'll cry, and then we'll adapt."

Clara's words were hardly comforting, but something about the way she said it calmed her down. There was a bit of logic in there that she clung to. It was all just change. As horrible as everything was, it all came down to change. Joan could change. She may not be fit for this world any longer, but she could change. She could grow and adapt.

Joan looked at Clara and smiled. "I'm glad you're here."

"Yeah. I'm glad you're here too."

The subsequent silence was awkward, like the type of awkward when lovers first declare their love for each other, wondering if the other had really meant it or had just said the words back to be nice. Joan cleared her throat and stood up, rubbing at her eyes.

"I must look like a mess." She walked over to the sink in the room, and turned on the water, slurping it down straight from the faucet.

"We've got to get out of here," Clara said abruptly.

It took a moment for Clara's words to register in Joan's mind. "What do you mean?"

"We're not safe here."

Joan laughed, a short sharp laugh with the ring of dismissal about it. "What are you talking about? There are soldiers all around us. I can't think of any place safer."

"Yeah, and have you looked at the soldiers recently?" Joan looked at Clara with confusion in her eyes, so Clara continued. "I've been watching them, they're different. The looks on their faces... there's fear in their eyes, Joan. I can see them breaking down."

"You're just imagining things," Joan said, mostly because she didn't want to believe it.

Clara grabbed Joan by the arm and pulled her out of the triage center. They climbed a flight of stairs and emerged out onto the concourse. It was night outside, and the noise of the day had subsided so that all that was left was the sound of gas-powered generators chugging away underneath the moans of the dead who numbered in the thousands. The night was filled with the perpetual rattling of the chain-link fence that encircled the Coliseum's courtyard.

"Look at them," Clara said.

Joan did look. The soldiers milled about, their faces haggard, their rifles clutched in their hands as they stood at their guard posts, atop makeshift platforms overlooking the perimeter of the Coliseum. There was little of the good-natured chatter that was so prevalent when they had first arrived. Men on the ground walked along the fence, jabbing bayoneted rifles into the eye sockets of the dead. The dead would slump to the ground, only to be replaced by a fresh dead face.

"Notice anything?" Clara asked.

"They're not shooting."

"They haven't been shooting for the last few hours. I asked a soldier why and he said they were conserving ammunition. You know what that means?"

Joan swallowed hard. "They don't have enough bullets to defend us."

"How long until those fences come down and we're trapped inside a concrete tomb with no way out?"

"What should we do?" Joan asked.

"I don't know," Clara replied. "The best thing we can do is be ready."

"Ready for what?"

"To fight for our lives."

Chapter 26: Killing Time

Katie's mouth felt dry and funky. They had motored through the wine in her purse in no time, and now they were in a luxury box, their clothes piled on the floor and rays of florescent light reflecting off of her pale skin. It was "Portland skin" she had always liked to joke, a skin conditioned by the clouds of the city into a milky whiteness that almost seemed translucent in the right light.

The lights were off in the luxury box, which was fine with them as they had broken down the wooden door to get into the room in the first place. Now they sat on the floor, their hands exploring, their dry, alcohol tongues caressing amid the stray rays of light that managed to sneak in from the main floor of the Coliseum.

A strange feeling of guilt flitted through the back of her mind, but was replaced by the touch of cold rough fingers between her legs, flicking and teasing. She could feel herself warm down there, a warmth that she hadn't felt in years.

There had been times when Jason had made her feel that way, but it had been long ago. This was something new, and then that feeling showed up again, that guilty feeling. In her head she screamed at herself, He's dead! There's nothing wrong with this! He's not coming back!

She was divided, literally and figuratively. In her heart, she felt a sense of loyalty that she had completely forgotten about. Her legs were now spread wide, the skin of her back catching on the cheap carpet of the luxury box as he slipped inside of her. She pressed her hands against his chest, and marveled at the strength she felt there as he leaned forward and put his weight on his arms. How different. Jason had always been soft, somewhat flabby, but Zeke, though he looked much the same, had a layer of hardened muscle underneath.

She wondered what he had looked like when he was younger, training all day, keeping himself fit and in shape. She closed her eyes and imagined him ten years younger, a ball of muscle and strength, ravaging her. Before she could delve further into her fantasy, he was done, and they lay on the ground, experiencing the awkward silence of a moment come too soon.

Katie was glad it was dark. She was glad he couldn't see her face and the disappointment on it. She sighed and rolled over on her side. What was she expecting, something out of a romance novel? She felt his arm snake across her ribs, and she suppressed a shudder.

"It'll be better next time," he said. He had all the tact of most men she supposed. He wasn't a dream come to life. He wasn't her ticket to a new life. He was just a man, just like Jason was. A little more muscular, but still just a man, just a false sense of security that came with responsibilities. Nothing in this world was free, especially not now. What was the price of their tryst? Polite conversation? An expectation that there would be a next time?

Even at the end of the world she had done it again, fallen into a trap that she made for herself.

Katie stood up, the light playing off of her naked body. She looked down at him in the darkness, at his hairy chest, his muscular forearms, his flaccid penis shining in a ray of light.

"Who said there will be a next time?" Her words were cold and as mean-spirited as she could make them.

Zeke put his arm under his head, shifting to his side, his penis lolling on his hip and said, "Did I do something wrong?"

"No, I did. I thought I was ready, but I'm not."

Zeke looked at her, his brown eyes taking her in. He smiled. "Hey, no harm no foul."

"Is that what passes for smooth where you come from?"

Zeke's eyes rolled in the dim light. He sat up and began searching for his clothes. "I wouldn't know what passes for smooth. That's not the type of guy I am. Truth is it's been a while since I've been with a woman. I just thought we could make the best of the situation."

"The best of the situation?" Katie kicked out at Zeke and he shrunk back from her. "Here's the situation, Zeke. Last night I put a bullet through the head of my husband and my son. Last night, my entire life was flipped upside down, and I killed and ran and survived. Why?"

Zeke sat on the floor, looking up at her. "I'm sorry."

Katie laughed out loud. "Aren't we all? Aren't we all fucking sorry, right now?"

The room was filled with silence. Zeke sat there, waiting for her to say something. She wanted him to be mad. She wanted him to storm out of there and never talk to her again, but he didn't. He sat there, like a rock, regarding her with a calmness that was driving her wild.

"What do you want? Why are you still here?"

"I'm just here. Whatever you need, I'm just here."

Katie put her hands to her face, groaned loudly and then sat down. "That's what I was afraid of. Listen. I've got some issues right now, clearly, but I don't want to lead you down the wrong path here. Whatever we do, that's just the moment. It means nothing. It's going to go nowhere. I just want you to know that."

Zeke nodded his head and smiled at her. "That's fine with me."

Katie looked skyward. "I've never met a person so easy to get along with. It's maddening."

"Hey, I got nothing but time to kill," he said, his teeth gleaming in a ray of light.

Katie reached into his lap, and grabbed him, stroking back and forth. She felt him harden in her hand. He leaned in for a kiss, and she slapped him across the face with her free hand. He leaned backwards, and she straddled him on the floor. "Well, let's kill a little time shall we?"

Chapter 27: Room #27

Lou woke up with the mother of all cricks in his neck. Sleeping in a chair in an arena was not the secret to a functioning neck and spine. He looked to his left and saw his leftover meal sitting there, untouched and cold. How long had he been asleep? It was impossible to tell time in the Coliseum. There were no windows inside the main floor of the arena.

He guessed it was night, as the majority of people in the arena were in various states of slumber. Snoring and heavy breathing filled the air around him, along with the stifled weeping of the few that were still awake. People slept wherever they could, bundled up in scratchy, army-issue blankets that weren't so much designed for comfort as they were to keep you functional.

Lou grabbed his plate of food and began shoveling the remains of the meal into his mouth, swallowing the cold globs out of prudence rather than hunger. He had to keep his strength up. As soon as Zeke and Lou had touched down in the Coliseum, Zeke had known that the place was doomed to fall.

"Look at those fences, man. How long do you think those will hold?" Zeke had asked.

Lou knew the answer. He knew that sooner or later, those fences were going to come tumbling down, and a lot of people were going to die in the ensuing chaos. Lou was betting that he wasn't going to be one of those. But he needed to know where Zeke was. It was funny how quickly he had become used to the man. He wasn't what you'd call likeable, but his quiet capability was comforting. While Lou was screaming inside of his head and swearing under his breath, Zeke would remain cool, calm, and logical. He admired the man, but he also felt a connection with him.

Now, he wasn't here, and while he swallowed a load of cold mashed potatoes and congealed gravy, he began to feel panicked by his absence. Lou looked to his right, and saw Brian and his two daughters curled up on a landing. Their bodies were entangled underneath several green blankets. Lou had wished to be a lot of things in his time, but right now, he was glad he wasn't a father. Out of all the people he had met and talked with in the Coliseum, Brian's case was easily the worst.

It wasn't that he had lost his wife, plenty of people had lost significant others. It was that he had lost his wife right in front of his kids, at the hands of the very people that were supposed to be protecting them. For the whole evening, the children had alternated between sitting in dumb, mute silence and sobbing uncontrollably. Brian seemed like an alright sort, but he clearly had no idea how to comfort two grieving children. Of course, that could be because he himself was grieving. Lou doubted that he would be able to do any better if their roles were reversed.

There were a lot of people in the Coliseum who had lost friends and relatives, but the majority of the people had simply not been able to contact their family members. They still had hope that they were out there somewhere, holed up, with the doors locked tight and the windows boarded up just like in an old horror movie. Brian had no such hope. The only positive thing Lou could see about Brian's situation was that Brian hadn't had to pull the trigger himself.

Then there was the fact that he still had two little girls to look after. The teenage girl, June, with red hair and a pouty face dotted with acne, seemed like she might be fine eventually. It was the littlest girl, Ruby, that was the major problem. She was 6-years-old and one-hundred percent helpless. Without someone there to protect her, she would be gone in no time. Brian had to know that. He had to know that he was guarding a ticking timebomb of sorrow that could explode at any moment.

It was a hell of a thing. Lou was glad it wasn't his thing. He stood up and cracked his back, groaning as quiet as he could at the noisy release of pressure. The arena was dim. Only about one out of every three lights was on. Lou bent down and put his boots back on his feet, though it pained him to do so. His first steps were stiff and painful, a result of their escape from the city the day before. Lou couldn't remember the last time he had run so far. Lou picked his way down the stairs, stepping over slumbering bodies wrapped in blankets, lying on the concrete like deep-breathing burritos.  He stepped out onto the concourse where the lights were brighter.

The concourse was empty for the most part, with the exception of a couple of soldiers and a few random night wanderers like himself. "Hey, man. What time is it?" he called to a soldier.

The soldier looked at the watch on his wrist, "Two o'clock."

"Thanks," he said and then strolled past the guard to the glass doors of the Coliseum. Outside, he saw a soldier smoking, his brown skin illuminated by a brief puff of the cigarette. Zeke had run out of smokes earlier in the day. He felt the pull of nicotine. He pushed on the door, and was immediately assaulted by a combination of noise and smell. The night was sticky hot. A bank of clouds had moved in during the night, trapping the day's heat. The glow of the moon shone behind the clouds.

"Can I bum one of those?" he said loud enough to be heard over the buzzing of the dead.

The soldier looked at him, the strain of the situation etched on his face. Lou sensed his hesitation. In the man's brain, he was going through the typical cost-benefit analysis that any smoker does whenever someone asks to bum a cigarette. Should I give him one? If I do, how many do I have left for myself? Can I get more cigarettes if I need to? If I don't give him one, will the person get mad or violent? Do I have to see this person again?

The man reached in his pocket and held the pack out to him. Great, generics. But beggars can't be choosers, so he held out his hand and pulled a cigarette from the packet. He put it to his lips, and then leaned forward when the soldier held out his lighter, cupping his hands so the wind wouldn't blow out the flame, not that there was any actual wind to do so.

Lou inhaled, and they stood smoking in silence, two black men, united by their color and the decay around them. "You think we're going to make it?" Lou asked.

The question caught the soldier off guard. "Man, I don't know. Things are looking bad." The soldier blew smoke into the air.

"Are we safe here?" Lou asked.

The man thought about it for a while. In between puffs, he said, "For now."

"What are you going to do when things go bad?"

The man looked at him, smiled and said, "I'm gonna use every bullet I got. Maybe get out of here while the gettin's good."

Lou nodded, indicating that he thought it was a good idea. "Any idea what's going to happen to everyone in here?" The slight smile that was on the man's face drifted away, and the look that was left behind was one of sincere sadness. "Lot of people gonna die."

Lou hated the man for the answer, but he appreciated his honesty. "Any idea how a man like me can get one of those?" Lou pointed to the soldier's rifle.

The soldier stopped looking at Lou. He was tight-lipped, and no answer was forthcoming.

"C'mon, man. We're all in this together. I got every right to defend myself. What happened to the right to bear arms?"

"You have no rights when martial law is in effect. The last thing we need is a bunch of high strung motherfuckers walking around this place with loaded weapons in their hands."

"I'm not talking about now, I'm talking about when things go bad. You leave us without weapons then, and it's like you're pulling the trigger yourself."

The soldier dropped his cigarette on the concrete and ground it out with his foot. "You want to see something?"

Lou knew the question was more than just a question. It was an answer without being an answer, the type of question that really meant, "I'm gonna show you where the weapons are, but you never heard it from me."

"Of course," Lou responded.

Without speaking the soldier walked onto the concourse. They circled around the arena for fifty yards, and then the man stopped, looking both ways down the concourse. Seeing no prying eyes, the man pulled a side door open, and they descended into the bowels of the Coliseum via a set of gloomy stairs.

At the bottom, the soldier opened the door a crack and looked out. Seeing no one around, he walked with purpose down the nondescript hallway. Blue metal doors appeared on either side of the corridor.

As the soldier walked past a door that looked like any other, he pointed at it. It was a brief gesture, and Lou would have missed it if he hadn't been paying close attention to the man. Lou looked at the number above the door. Number 27. He burned the number in his mind as they continued their trek through the bottom of the Coliseum.

Without warning, the soldier turned and began yelling at him, "What are you doing down here? Citizens are supposed to stay on the stadium level."

Lou was confused for a second, but then another uniformed soldier appeared around the bend of the lower concourse.

"What do we have here?" the new soldier asked.

Lou understood now. The soldier was caught, and now he was doing what he had to do. Lou played along.

"I was just exploring."

"C'mon. You know you can't be back here." The soldier grabbed him by the arm and marched him back the way they had come. The new soldier followed along for good measure.

"Goddamn civilians are worse than a damn child on Christmas, poking their nose in where it don't belong," the new soldier said.

"Tell me about it."

Lou played the part of stupid civilian. "I was just seeing if they had a couch or something down here. Those cots are killing my back."

"You'll just have to make do," the new soldier said.

When they reached the concourse, the original soldier shoved him roughly and said, "Stay up here. Downstairs is off limits."

"You got it," Lou said.

The two soldiers walked off in the direction of the front doors of the Coliseum. The soldier that had helped him looked back over his shoulder and Lou nodded in his direction. The soldier gave him a nod in return, and then he was gone, around the curve of the concourse.

"What was that all about?"

Lou jumped and spun around. It was just Zeke, his clothes rumpled and a smile on his face.

"Just getting a little help for the end of the world."

"Sounds good to me," Zeke said.

They bumped fists and then walked back into the arena, while Lou told him about room #27 and what was stored inside.

Chapter 28: Shit Buddies

Rudy's cot bowed beneath his weight. Amanda watched him snoring away as she sat up on her own cot. The cots were made of a lightweight aluminum frame covered with green nylon. It reminded her of when she had been sick at elementary school and the nurse had made her lie down until her parents could show up.

Amanda sat up and stretched her back while she regarded Rudy. She felt sorry for him and yet oddly protective. He was a ball of self-esteem issues and poor health, but somehow, she felt responsible for him. He would be dead already if it weren't for her and, to a lesser extent, Chloe.

Amanda turned her gaze to Chloe. She too was sleeping, as calm as the dead. Amanda shuddered at the thought. She didn't quite know what to make of Chloe. There was something about her that was cold and almost inhuman. She seemed capable, but Amanda would rather rely on a starving tiger to watch her back than Chloe.

It was early in the morning; how early she didn't know, but the majority of people were slumbering in their cots or around the arena, bundled up in blankets. A feeling of emptiness washed over her. How many people had died in the last 24 hours? How many people were still trapped out there. Or did she have it wrong? Weren't they technically trapped in here?

At first, when they had been rescued by the army, she had been happy, ecstatically happy, dodged-a-bullet happy. But as they sat on the transport, and the medic looked at the bitten soldier, that had all changed. The medic shook his head in silence, pulled a revolver from his belt and put a bullet through the man's head.

At that point, someone else had been in charge, and then came the harrowing journey to the Coliseum. She wanted to purge the memories from her mind, but there were too many of them. Bullets flying, limbs being blown off, and always the arms, reaching for them. If the dead ever gained the ability to stretch like that guy from the Fantastic Four, they would all be dead in a matter of days.

But they couldn't stretch, so death was a slow thing. Death was coming for them in waves of plodding, unsleeping flesh. It was paused outside, waiting for them to tire, to let down their guard, and then it would all be over.

Rudy shifted on his cot, and she looked at him once again. So helpless. So sad. He was pathetic, but he was the only person she knew who was currently alive. Her parents had been unreachable via her cell phone, and the signal had all but stopped registering by the time she had passed out. For all intents and purposes, her cell phone was now nothing more than a glorified calculator.

The worst part was knowing that if everything were alright, she could have just hopped into a car and been in Eugene in a little under two hours. Now, they might as well be a world away. Was there a refugee camp in Eugene? Were things as bleak there as they were here? Amanda hoped not.

Amanda felt pressure in her bladder, so she rose from her cot. She climbed over a metal railing and hiked her way up the concrete steps. She took a right on the concourse, and waved at a soldier as she walked to the bathroom. She undid the belt on her pants and hovered over the now-soiled toilet seat. She guessed the janitorial staff had the day off... for the rest of their lives.

She was hovering there, urine tinkling into the toilet loudly, when she saw boot toes appear underneath the crack to the door. A sense of dread rushed through her body immediately, and she stopped urinating out of instinct.

"Don't stop on my account," said a voice on the other side of the door. The voice contained a sinister quality that sent a flood of adrenaline rushing through her body. Amanda stood up, and hiked her pants up around her waist. She grasped the loose ends of her belt, and that's when the man on the other side of the door kicked it in. It was the soldier she had waved at. He was leering, his rifle flung over his shoulder, and his teeth gleaming in the shadows of the stall. He rushed at her, his hands pawing in places where they had no business.

Amanda pushed and fought the man, but he was like unbending iron, attempting to smash her into the back of the stall. She lashed out at the place where she knew the man's aggression originated from. She threw a fist at his groin, but she didn't connect. Just the attempt was enough to send the soldier into a rage.

The man punched her across the jaw, and she tasted blood in her mouth. Her eyes went dark, and all she could do was flail her arms in an attempt to keep the man off of her. But he was stronger, and she felt the stubble of his cheek against her own skin. She screamed, but it was cut off with a squeak as the man placed his rough hand across her throat.

"What are you fightin' for? It's the end of the world, baby. Live a little."

As her head spun, she saw him reach for his own belt with his free hand. There was a sharp whistle behind the soldier. He turned around, and then he was writhing on the floor, clutching at his groin. As the stars cleared from her eyes, she saw Chloe kicking the man in the face. Teeth skittered across the floor, and then there was no more struggle. Chloe didn't stop, and by the look on her face, Amanda could tell that she wouldn't stop for a while. When she was done, the soldier's face was no longer recognizable, and loose teeth gleamed at her from the filthy floor of the bathroom.

Chloe looked at her in the stall, held out her hand, and Amanda grabbed it. Chloe pulled her to her feet and then they walked quickly and silently out of the bathroom. They ran down the stairs to the arena floor, and Amanda sat on the floor, pulling her knees up to her chest and hugging them tight.

Chloe looked around the arena, her eyes calm, and her breathing shallow. Amanda waited in silence as Chloe scanned the area. Amanda couldn't help but see the soldier's face leering at her, his smile impossibly shiny. She still felt his stubble on her cheek, and she wiped at the places where he had touched her.

"You alright?" Chloe asked.

"I think so," Amanda said.

Rudy stirred on his bunk, looking over at them, his eyes squinted closed like Jabba the Hut, lying on his side. "What's going on?"

"Go back to sleep, Rudy."

Rudy's feet lifted into the air as he struggled to get enough leverage to sit up. He grunted and groaned, fighting gravity and his own rubbery bulk. "What the hell happened to your face?" Rudy said pointing at Amanda's jaw.

"Nothing happened," Amanda said, feeling a sense of embarrassment that she knew she shouldn't feel.

"A soldier tried to rape her in the bathroom," Chloe said.

"What?" Rudy asked, unable to believe his ears. His face became red, and he bounded to his feet, quicker than Amanda or Chloe could believe. "Where is he?"

"He's already taken care of," Chloe said. Amanda again felt a sense of dread at Chloe's words... the coldness. But she had saved her. She had kept her from something even worse than a punch to the jaw.

"We have to tell someone," Rudy said.

"The man is dead. If we tell someone, then we're next. Who do you think they're going to side with? It's martial law out there, Rudy."

Rudy shook his head, refusing to believe it. "It's not like that. These are soldiers; these are good guys."

"Wake the fuck up, Rudy. We're not safe. We might never be safe again."

Rudy sat on the cot, and it held his weight, despite the fact that it bowed heavily in the middle. Amanda was sure that it was about to break at any moment.

"What do we do then?"

Chloe looked at both of them. "We play it cool. Act like nothing happened. When they start asking around, shrug your shoulders and play dumb. In the meantime, no one goes anywhere without someone else. We're fine down here, there's enough people around, but we don't go anywhere without someone else."

"Even me?"

"Especially you, Rudy. You couldn't fight your way out of wet paper bag."

Rudy looked offended.

"Don't worry, Rudy. I'll be your shit buddy," Amanda said.

Rudy's face went red. She loved when it did that. Even Chloe laughed a little at him.

Chapter 29: On Notice

Zeke shot upwards at the sound of the Coliseum's PA system crackling to life. He rubbed his eyes as he looked around, and he knew things were not right as soon as he noticed an armed soldier standing at the exit to the concourse. His rifle was not hanging loose; it was trained on the arena floor.

"This is Major Miller of the United States Army. I need all civilians to move down onto the floor of the arena."

There was a sluggish response. It did not sit well with the unseen Major Miller. "Now, people! This is not a suggestion. This is an order."

"What the hell is going on?" Lou asked.

"Trouble," Zeke replied.

The speed of the civilians was still not fast enough for the Major. "If any civilians refuse to move to the floor of the arena, they will be given a warning. If they still refuse to move, they will be shot."

Zeke and Lou rose to their feet. To their right, they saw Brian pick up his youngest and begin the awkward march down the steps with a near comatose child bundled in his arms. June followed, rubbing the sleep from her eyes. All around the arena people were moving, bounding down the stairs in a rush.

When Zeke and Lou reached the floor of the arena, Zeke turned in a slow circle. At each entrance was an armed soldier, their rifle trained on the floor of the arena.

The PA system crackled again, and Major Miller said, "Thank you for cooperating. I have a message for you." The crowd of refugees looked around at each other, questioning looks on their faces. Zeke could feel the tension of the crowd rolling over his body.

"Up until now, it's all been cake and gravy. But things are changing," Major Miller's voice had a hard edge to it. "This morning, we found one of our men dead in a bathroom stall. His skull had been bashed in."

The Major let his words hang in the air for a second. Zeke scanned the faces of the crowd around him. One face in particular stood out to him. It was the face of a young girl, she couldn't have been much older than twenty, and there was a fresh bruise along her jawline. A hollow look of fear filled her eyes. She dropped her gaze to the floor as he watched.

"We can't have that. We are here to protect you. And now, we have to protect you from yourselves. Vacation is over, people. We are in a tenuous situation at best. The protocols are going to be different now. There are no more free rides. Citizens will work for their food, or they will not eat. You will help yourselves, or you will all die. And for those who killed our soldier, we have a message for you. We will find you, and you will be dealt with. For anyone who doesn't like the new protocols, you are not prisoners. You can climb the fence out front and leave any time you wish. We won't stop you."

Zeke scoffed at the man's words. The man was giving them a choice that was really no choice at all. You can either do things the army way, or you can kill yourself. It wasn't a choice at all.

Zeke watched the young girl as she kept her eyes locked on the floor. The fat man next to her, who couldn't have been much older than the girl, kept looking at her and another woman. His face had turned beet red, and Zeke could see the same look of fear in his eyes that he had seen in the girl. Something was going on there. It could be just your run-of-the-mill "I'm afraid for my life" fear, but he thought it was more than that.

"... so get your rest while you can. At dawn, we will give you all jobs, and we expect you to do them."

The Major's speech ended without ceremony, and the people on the floor of the arena milled about, while the soldiers disappeared from the exits, drawing back like snakes into burrows.

Zeke watched the fat man and the young woman. The man's cheeks blew out as he sighed a heavy sigh of tension. Immediately, the man and the young girl began speaking with another woman in hushed tones, their heads put together. Zeke recognized a plan being put together when he saw it.

Lou tapped him on the shoulder and said, "Hey, man. What do you make of that?" Lou asked.

"It's starting," Zeke said.

"What?"

"The end."

****

Lou went to find some breakfast while Zeke grabbed a cot next to the trio of whisperers. To the untrained eye, he seemed to be taking a nap, his arm hanging over his eyes, and paying them no attention at all. In reality, he heard almost every word they said. From their conversations he was able to piece together what had happened.

The young girl, the one with the bruise on her jaw, had been attacked. The other girl, the one with the tight body and the dead eyes, had come to her defense. The fat man... well, Zeke didn't know how he fit in, but he was definitely a part of it judging by his shifty eyes, constant hand-wringing, and general skittishness.

When Zeke had heard enough, he sat up, let his eyes adjust to the harsh light of the arena, and walked over to the three of them. "Sounds like you guys have yourselves a problem."

They sat there, dumbfounded, as if he were speaking to them in an alien language. Then, the one with the dead eyes spoke, "Anything we have is no concern of yours."

Zeke squatted down and looked the girl in the eyes. She was the leader. She was the only one he really needed to talk to, but he spoke loud enough for the others to hear, for their benefit. "No, it is our concern because things are about to get very ugly in here."

"What are you talking about?" the red-haired man asked, and Zeke could see that he was more of a boy really.

Zeke smiled and took a pointed look around the arena. "Place like this... it's got eyes." Zeke nodded at a corner of the arena. A shiny black dome hung on the wall, and as they looked around they noticed others scattered throughout the arena. "Now those eyes may not have seen what you did, and I'm glad you did what you did, but they may have seen something. One person goes into a bathroom. Another person follows, and then a third. Only two come out. I'm no mathematician, but even I can do the subtraction on that."

The young girl's face paled. The boy turned red and looked like he was trying to swallow his own face. The blonde girl just stared at him with those cold, dead eyes. "What do you want?"

Zeke licked his lips. "The way I see it, you've gotten us all into a heap of trouble here. This could have been a fine place, for a while at least. Now it's going to get rough, but it doesn't matter because it was bound to end up this way sooner or later. Put a group of people with guns in charge of a group with none and bad things are bound to happen."

"Get to the point," Chloe spat.

"We're gonna get out of this place. It's doomed. We knew that from the moment we stepped foot inside. Hell, we all know it. But we've got a plan. All we need is some numbers, some people willing to do what needs to be done. The way I see it, you can help us, or you can wait for those soldiers to find the right footage on those cameras. Then they find you. Then they find her." Zeke hiked a thumb at the young girl, "After that, they throw you over the fence, or worse."

The young girl groaned. The blonde nodded her head seeing the sense in Zeke's words. "So what do we have to do?"

Zeke smiled. He was glad they saw things his way. The first thing we have to do is destroy the evidence. It's not quite time to pull the pin on this place yet. So we're going to need some more time."

"Jesus," the boy said. "Will we ever get back to normal?"

"I'll take alive over normal any day, kid." Zeke held out his hand, and the boy shook it in a flaccid way that made Zeke's skin crawl. "Name's Zeke."

****

Katie watched Zeke talk to the girl. From her spot in the crowd, she had been keeping an eye on Zeke. She didn't know why. She was curious about him. Was he going to be true to his word, and keep the physical thing just physical, or would he want more? When she saw him talking to the blonde, she felt something that she hadn't felt in an eon. Jealousy. Where had that emotion been? The truth was that Jason was nothing much to look at. He was so plain, so boring, that she never really worried about whether he would come home at night smelling of another woman's perfume.

But Zeke. That was a different story. Zeke was a man. Come up with any definition of what a man was supposed to be, and you could attach Zeke's name to it. The jealousy was a surprise. That he was talking to the blonde and that Katie actually cared was another one. She felt as if her heart and her brain were tugging her in different directions. She wondered if she would split in half before one side won.

Katie looked at the girl. She had soft features, but the strength of youth. Her eyes were piercing, round and big. She looked like one of those anime characters that her son had loved to draw so much. Her curves were out of this world, and Katie could see why anyone would be keen on talking to her. Hell, if Katie were a man, she would be all over her.

But what truly bothered Katie was that Zeke talking to the blonde was something that she couldn't control. She had put Zeke in his place in the luxury box, taking control of the situation and letting him know that he had no hold over her. She felt good about that. But what she didn't feel good about was Zeke talking to this girl. She didn't like it one bit.

Chapter 30: In the Booth

Private Hugh Bryant sat in the security room of the Coliseum, pouring through the footage from the previous night. It was a chore because the security system didn't come with an instruction manual. He was working feverishly, checking each feed, rewinding, fast-forwarding, rewinding again. There was just so much coverage. With the exception of the locker rooms and the bathrooms, it seemed as if every inch of the Coliseum had a camera covering it.

Major Miller was a tough man, and he didn't want to let him down. The consequences for disappointing the Major were always harsh and more often than not mean-spirited. Many of the men hated him, his round, ruddy face always barking out orders amidst a stream of profanity. But he wasn't all bad. When you did a good job, he let you know it, and Bryant had done enough good jobs for the Major over the last five years to feel like the man wasn't a complete asshole. He wasn't about to let him down now.

Bryant moved his hand across the security console, moving the trackball in his hand back and forth. That wasn't the right camera either. He punched up another camera, one of about a hundred as far as he could tell. This one gave a God's eye view of the concourse. He rewound the footage to two in the morning and then skimmed through it. His breath caught in his throat as he saw Private Estep walking into a bathroom. He rewound the footage, just to be sure. Yep, that was him.

Private Estep was one of those guys that should have probably been in prison, but who had found a home in the military where his depravity was largely a benefit... when he was on foreign soil. Most of the men had no love for the man, but he was one of their own, and the prevailing sentiment was that whoever had murdered him had to pay.

Private Bryant rewound the footage and watched as a pretty woman waved at the soldier and then entered the bathroom. His stomach turned as he watched Private Estep look up and down the concourse as if he were going to cross a street. Seeing no prying eyes, he then headed into the bathroom after the girl, hiking his pants up and smiling like a goon.

He leaned back in his chair and wiped the sweat from his brow. He had found it. The footage rolled on, and then he saw a beautiful blonde woman enter the bathroom. He double-timed the footage and watched as the two girls came out of the bathroom, a swollen jaw, a disheveled look, and one girl clutching the other one. He didn't need to see into the bathroom to  know what had happened, and he sat back in his chair to  think about what he was going to do about it.

On one hand, perhaps Private Estep had gotten what he deserved. It didn't matter to Bryant that Estep was a "brother-in-arms"; no true brother of his would ever attack a woman. Private Bryant knew that there was no way that the now-deceased soldier was going in there just to take a leak. He was going in there to do some foul business and had gotten what he deserved. But Major Miller wouldn't see it that way. All Miller would see was a dead soldier. Dead soldiers meant retribution. Retribution meant those girls would have to pay for defending themselves from being raped.

Jesus, he thought. He leaned back in his chair and prayed for an answer, hands clasped together under his chin, head bowed forward. He had decided what to do when there was a knock on the door. He quickly switched the monitor to another channel and then hopped up out of the rolling chair that he had been sitting in. He walked over to the office door, turned the knob, and fell flat on his back as the door was slammed backwards.

A man stood above him, business in his eyes. He was a thick man, built for trouble, and black stubble framed his square jaw. The man picked him up off the ground by his shirt, his teeth clenched in a menacing fashion. Private Bryant didn't see the first punch; he didn't see the second punch either.

When he woke up, his head was spinning and he was bound and gagged, silver duct tape sealing his mouth. All of the monitors had been smashed, and the DVD's that stored all of the footage were broken into pieces. Three men and two women were gathered in a circle, speaking in hushed tones.

The blonde girl, the one from the video looked over at him, a suspicious look on her face. "He's awake."

The tall white man looked at him and then spoke to the bald black man, "C'mon, man. You know what we gotta do."

The black man had his back to Private Bryant, and he said, "No. I know this man. He's a good man."

"You're out of your mind," the tall white man said. "We let this guy walk, and we're dead. He's going to go straight to that colonel, and it's not just going to be them, it's going to be us too."

The fat man whined, "I don't want to die, but I don't want to kill anyone either."

"No one cares what you want. It's not like you'd be the one killing him anyway," the blonde girl spat at him.

Bryant grasped the situation, but there was nothing he could do. They were deciding his fate right in front of him. Underneath the duct tape, he tried to make words, but nothing he tried was intelligible.

"This is the same guy that showed us where the weapons were locked up," the black man said. Now Bryant recognized him. The unwieldy, khaki boots. The bald head. The black man was his only chance. "We can't just kill him," he continued.

"Showing us where weapons are and covering our ass for a murder are two entirely different things," the blonde said.

"She's right," the other girl said.

The black man shook his head and then sighed. He looked at Private Bryant as if to say he was sorry.

"It's decided," the tall white man said. He pulled a knife from his belt and advanced on the man.

Private Bryant shook his head from side to side and tried as hard as he could to speak.

The white man squatted down and sat in front of him. There was no joy on his face, just a cold efficiency that scared the daylights out of Private Bryant. He couldn't believe that this was how it was going to end, killed by the very people he was sworn to protect.

Private Bryant flinched when the man raised his hand to his face. He squeezed his eyes shut as he felt the first bit of pain, and then it was over. The man had pulled the duct tape off of his face with a loud rip.

"I'm sorry about this. Any last words?" the man said. Private Bryant hesitated. The man pulled his knife hand back, ready to plunge it into his body.

"Wait!" He didn't scream the word so much as he projected it, making it as commanding as possible. The man had an army bearing about him that he recognized, and the tone of voice worked.

"What?" the man asked.

"You're not out of the woods yet," Private Bryant said.

"What are you talking about?"

Private Bryant looked around the room, making eye contact with everyone he could. "The DVD's are only half of it. You also need to destroy the hard drives. The discs only record the last 24 hours, the hard drive saves everything, and I'm not the only soldier here who can access the security cameras."

The white man looked over his shoulders and waved the others over to the monitors. "Find that hard drive."

The group moved over to the desk, and began looking at the smashed up console. Private Bryant felt relief. They had no idea what they were doing.

The young girl spoke to the fat man, "Can't you find them, Rudy? Aren't you some sort of computer expert?"

Rudy threw his hands up in the air. "I'm not that much of a geek. My only real experience with this type of stuff is video games."

The black man kicked at the console, trying to break things.

The blonde girl and the brunette squatted down and took turns yanking on parts of the console to no avail.

The man with the knife sighed. "We don't have time for this." Without warning, he jerked Private Bryant to his feet, the knife held to his throat. "What do we do?"

Private Bryant was calm. "Free my hands, and I'll show you."

The man with the knife hesitated for a brief second, but then he sawed the duct tape off of Bryant's wrists with the knife. Private Bryant sank to his knees, and slid the entire console out from the wall. He worked fast, sweat springing to his brow. He popped the console open neatly after removing a handful of screws with his ever-present screwdriver. He reached into the back of the console, and pulled out a metal box, and held it up the way a doctor holds up a newborn baby for the mother to see.

The man with the knife snatched it out of his hand. "Nice work, Private."

The man examined the device, threw it on the ground and crushed it. It came open a bit and was dented, but Private Bryant knew that his boys could still get the information off of it. "Here, let me."

He held out his hand for the knife. The man looked at him like he was crazy, and then he took a leap of faith and handed the knife to Private Bryant. His heart jumped in his chest. Bryant knelt down and cracked open the hard drive's case, pulling the disks free. Then he handed the silver disks to the big white man and said, "This is what you need. Mess those up, and they'll never know."

The man crushed them in his hands, grabbed the knife from Private Bryant, and drew deep furrows all over the disks. Then he slid the knife into his belt and turned to Private Bryant. "Thanks for your help. The way I see it, you just saved our lives and your own. You helped us, so now you're in it with us. Do you agree?"

Private Bryant shook his head.

"Good." The man held out his hand. "The name is Zeke."

Private Bryant shook the man's hand in a firm handshake.

"This is going to sting a bit," he said.

"Huh?"

Bryant blinked his eyes, waiting for them to clear, then he heard the sound of duct tape and felt the man wrapping his wrists. When his vision finally cleared, the man stood over him with the tape in his hand. "Sorry about the punch, but I figured you might want to mess that face up a little more before you went to that Colonel and told him you got overrun in the booth."

"It's alright. I was kind of expecting it."

"What are you going to tell them when they find you?" Zeke asked.

"Men in masks came, jumped me, and destroyed all of the evidence."

"Good. We'll see you around..."

Zeke left the words hanging there, so he filled them in, "Private Hugh Bryant."

The man smiled. "We'll see you around, Hugh."

The group filed out of the room. The black man nodded at him, and gave him a salute. Hugh Bryant closed his eyes and took a nap.

****

When he awoke, the Colonel was there, squatting over him. The Colonel's jaw muscles pulsed with fury as Hugh told his story. He was furious, and for his negligence, Hugh Bryant pulled extra duty on the fences. He didn't complain. Lives were saved, including his own. Sometimes the army had to protect itself from itself, and Hugh figured that's what he had done.

Chapter 31: On the Fence

The refugees of the Coliseum were issued bayonets. They were not issued the rifles to attach them to. The Major made sure of that. When the sun came up, the refugees lined up outside, dry-heaving amid the stench. Rudy was in the first batch of refugees to take a shift. With the handle of the bayonet in his soft paw, he was marched out to the fence and was ordered to dispatch the enemy.

"What do you mean?" he asked.

The soldier that he was talking to was mean-looking, and the last thing he wanted to do was piss the man off. He had suffered enough embarrassment in the last few days, but his cooperation didn't matter because this soldier in particular seemed to be taking the death of another soldier as a personal affront to his honor. He stepped up to Rudy, towering half a foot over him. With Rudy's face in his chest, the soldier leered down at him and said, "Are you fucking retarded? Kill the motherfuckers. Take that fucking knife, and stab it into their heads. A little exercise might do a lump of shit like you some good."

The soldier shoved him and pushed him toward the fences, where the stench of rot was even riper. He didn't want to do it, but he gagged and then threw up on the ground. He heard the soldiers and some of the refugees laughing behind him. In the morning sun, he straightened his back and slowly drew his eyes up from the puddle of vomit between his shoes to see the dead on the other side of the fence. He had seen them before, but now he was inches from them, and the decaying process had progressed quickly in the hot sun. He locked eyes with the dead woman across from him. Her hair was long, black, and crusted with dry blood. Her eyes were cloudy, and her skin had turned a sickly gray shade. The skin of her fingertips was gone, and all that was left was the bones, sharp and white. Her fingers protruded through the chain link fence, and Rudy stepped closer to her.

Behind him, the soldier urged him on like some sort of deranged cheerleader. "Go on, boy. Kill that Annie."

Annies. The name made his skin crawl. Rudy reached back and plunged the knife at the creatures head, putting all of his weight behind it. The bayonet glanced off of the creature's forehead, skittering sideways, and a flap of filleted forehead flopped over the creature's eyes. It pawed at the air blindly.

The soldier behind him laughed. "Don't blind them, fat boy. Kill 'em!" More soldiers joined in. They were sitting in the sun, cleaning their weapons and smoking cigarettes, while the refugees of the Coliseum sat behind them in rows, waiting for their shift at the fence.

Rudy took a few shallow breaths and pumped himself up to try again. This time he aimed for the creature's eyes. He plunged the bayonet into the lady's eyes, and a cloudy liquid erupted from it. He drove the knife deeper until he hit something hard. He put his weight behind it, and the bone behind the woman's eye broke, the knife plunging into something softer. The creature twitched, then dropped, falling off the end of the bayonet. Another creature took its place. Behind him, he heard applause.

He knew it was mocking, but inside, Rudy was thinking, Hell yeah. I can kill these things! He killed another, and then another. By the fourth one his exuberance was gone, his arms were tired, and sweat was running down his pink face. Killing people was a lot more work than it was in Call of Duty, that was for sure.

After his fifth kill, Rudy stepped back and looked at his handiwork. The fence ran for a good two hundred yards. It was level thanks to the concrete apron that ran around the courtyard of the Coliseum. The dead still lined the fence, eagerly stepping into the spots that were vacated by the dead that Rudy and the other refugees had killed. Beneath their mechanical movements, the truly dead were now being trampled into jelly and bone dust. On the ground, blood and pus were beginning to leak under the fence. They had no such concept as respect for the dead.

"What's the hold-up, darlin'?" the asshole soldier said behind him.

Rudy killed his sixth creature.

****

Amanda watched Rudy for an hour. When the hour was up, the soldiers called time, and the forty refugees that had been sent to the fence, dropped their arms wearily to their side. They handed over their bayonets, and then the soldiers picked out forty more lucky volunteers. She had just enough time to look at Rudy's blistered hands before the soldier that had been heckling Rudy for the last hour plopped a bayonet in her hands and told her to get to work. Chloe was up on the line with her, and they set about the work of dispatching the dead.

For Amanda, the experience was terrifying. She couldn't see through the mass of dead before her. For every one that dropped, another appeared, and still there was no glimpse of daylight on the other side of the fence. Amanda was too short to reach some of the taller creatures, so she picked and chose which ones she would kill until a tiny creature showed up. It used to be a little girl. Now it was a snarling abomination, shoving its diminutive fingers through the fence to try and reach Amanda.

She hesitated, and then her arm dropped to her side. "What the fuck are we doing?"

"You say something, sweetheart?" a soldier asked behind her.

Amanda did not reply. She just stared at the faded eyes of the creature in front of her and kept the bayonet at her side.

She heard the boots of the soldier walking briskly over to her. "Go on, girl. Kill it. If that thing was on this side of the fence, it would sure as hell try to kill you."

She said nothing.

Her silence infuriated the soldier. She could sense that. From her left, Chloe spoke calmly to her, "Just do it, Amanda."

Amanda's voice caught in her throat, and she could barely get the words out. "It's wrong."

The soldier spun her around roughly and looked her in the eyes. "It's wrong?" he asked in a mocking voice. "Girl, I'll tell you what's wrong. What's wrong is having to guard a bunch of spoiled civilians who don't give two shits about you while your family is on the other side of the continent. Shit, I bet on the East Coast, there's an asshole just like me yelling at an asshole just like you right now. You know what I'd want him to say?"

Amanda looked at the ground.

"I'd want him to say 'Kill that son of a bitch, before it kills someone else.' That someone else could be my kids, my wife. And this little shit in front of us, well, you kill it and maybe you help out one of my brothers, keep their kids safe... keep their wives safe."

Amanda said nothing.

"You don't care about my wife? My kids?" the soldier asked, his hands on his knees, bent over to look her in the face.

"You can do it, Amanda. Just pretend it's him," Chloe said.

The soldier laughed and looked up at Chloe. "Barbie doll, you best mind your own damn business."

Amanda spun and drove the bayonet home. The ex-little girl shuddered and fell, and then Amanda did the same, screaming at the top of her lungs. The mass of the dead became excited, drawn by her rage.

Chloe smiled. "Atta girl, Amanda. You can do it."

Time disappeared, and when the soldier called in the next shift, Amanda fell to the ground, the bayonet sliding out of her hand and clattering on the concrete. Chloe and Rudy lifted her up by her shoulders, and took her away from the fence.

****

Brian left his kids with Zeke and stumbled to the fence with a bayonet in hand. His mind was clouded with grief. Sadness seemed to be a part of him, every bit as important as his hand or his wife or his children.

Thoughts of Sarah clouded his mind as he felt the rough rubber handle of the bayonet in his hand. He could see her in her dress, her brown eyes shining in the sunlight. They had been married for ten years, ten great fucking years. The number loomed large in his mind as he stepped up to the fence.

He turned and looked over his shoulder to see his babies with their backs to him. Zeke was drawing their attention away from the proceedings at the fence. They had seen too much already. Zeke nodded at him, reassuring Brian that everything would be alright. Zeke was a blessing.

Brian felt guilty for being as useless as he had been. The father part of his heart struggled with the broken part, battling back and forth. He knew he needed to step it up, reassert himself as a normal, chipper presence in the girls' lives, but knowing and actually being able to pull it off were two different things. It was as if he were a drowning swimmer, stuck underneath the weight of an ocean whose waters were composed of his own sadness. He could see the sun shining down through that ocean, but he couldn't get there. It would just take time.

In front of him, a dead man smashed its face against the fence. Brian hefted the bayonet in his hand, and then drove it into the creature's head, content that his babies weren't watching. The blade sunk into the soft flesh of the dead man's eyes. The creature stiffened and jittered around, and the sensation of the bayonet stabbing through flesh and bone left Brian repulsed. He wondered what Sarah would have said.

They had always been pacifists. Their children weren't allowed to watch any movies with guns or extreme violence. They had never raised a hand to their children, though their friends always insisted that discipline was the way to raise responsible, well-adjusted children. Sarah always countered these arguments with, "Violence is a path that leads to dehumanization." And their approach to child-rearing had been acceptable in a world where the government kept them relatively safe... but now, in this world, Brian wondered if they had made a mistake.

Brian watched as the dead man fell to the ground, the knife dripping gore onto the concrete. His shoes stuck momentarily in the blood that had begun to seep under the fence guarding the Coliseum. He stepped up to the next dead person and delivered a blow that jarred his elbow and shoulder with the force.

It felt good, this violence. With every blow that he struck, he could feel the ocean of sadness around him shrinking. Killing, it was like therapy. He took his emotions, bundled them into a little ball and shot them down his arm and into the blade in his hand. Then he took the blade and deposited those emotions into the brains of the living dead. The sun was closer now; he could see the surface through the murky water.

Dozens of the creatures died at his hand, and he kept working, slaying with no care for time or his own energy. Brian disappeared, replaced by a being of pure emotion, sweat running down its face, its hands sticky with blood, its mind locked away in the task of killing. On the fence, Brian grew to knew the joys of violence, the pleasure of killing and taking on problems with a physical approach. He was reborn... and then he died.

The soldiers called an end to the shift, yelling and signaling for everyone to stop, but Brian didn't want to stop. Brian turned around to look at the soldier behind him, and for the first time since Sarah had been murdered, because that's what he thought of her death as, he smiled. Then he spun on his heel, eager to remove one last member of the dead army from the face of the planet. He plunged the knife into the eye of a man in a leather jacket. The force of the blow caused the man's eye to erupt, spraying cloudy liquid into Brian's own eye.

Brian stepped back, rubbing at his eye, trying to get the liquid out. It was a reflex reaction, and in his haste, he forgot that his own hands were covered in the blood of the dead and with a single swipe of his face, he ensured that he would never reach the top of that ocean of sadness. In fact, he was down deeper than ever.

****

The day continued, refugees taking their turn at the fence, hour after hour. Still the dead congregated, and a new problem arose. The fence was tall, but not tall enough. As the bodies piled, up the dead continued to climb them, trampling over the corpses beneath them. And it wasn't long before the tallest of the dead, could reach over the top of the fences.

Major Miller appeared from inside the arena, short, with a bulbous red face. If he grew a beard, he would look like an alcoholic Santa Claus, but his face was clean-shaven. He took a look at the situation and called a halt to the proceedings. To dispatch any more of the dead would allow them to crest the fence. Everyone saw it, as did the Major.

The refugees knelt and sat on the concrete apron that was the Coliseum's courtyard. The Major pulled a bullhorn out and flicked it on, holding it up to his thick pink lips. "You did a good job today. There will be food; you will eat. But know this. If another one of my soldiers is hurt, I will return the favor to you. We are here to protect you, but if we must protect ourselves from you, then we will do what we have to."

The refugees filed into the arena, silent and worried. The lights on the concourse flickered.

Chapter 32: Wanted

They were locked in the booth, Murph and the Chief. The dead roamed the power plant, their numbers growing. Shambling corpses from the city trickled in through the downed gate, stumbling over the twisted metal and old, cracked pavement. Murph had no idea of what was drawing them to the power plant, but their numbers had grown considerably.

The town of Boardman was a small town, never more than 3,500 people living there at any given moment. How many of those people were dead now? How many of those dead were making their way to the power plant, drawn by some impulse that Murph was too dim to understand?

Murph had watched the gauges dwindle over the last hour. The power plant was not putting out the amount of energy that it had been. They knew the reason why. One look at the conveyor belt was answer enough. The coal wasn't coming in consistently. Out in the yard, mountains of raw coal stood under covered sheds. The hoppers that fed the conveyor belt relied on this mountain for fuel, but the hoppers had to be manually filled to keep the boiler burning. Every other aspect of the power plant was automated. The coal was crushed before it was fed into the boiler. The heat from the burning coal super-heated the water flowing in industrial pipes, transforming it into steam that turned turbines. The turning of the turbines created electricity, all the electricity that Portland would need. But the hoppers were running dry. Someone would have to go outside and use the mini-dozer to push more coal into the hoppers.

They both knew it, but still they sat there, watching as the power plant's output dwindled. When it had reached a critical level, the Chief stood up and looked at the door. "Well, we can't wait any longer."

This was the moment that Murph was dreading, the moment where the Chief sent him out among the dead to refill the hoppers. He would do it too... or at least try to. It wasn't as if he had anything else to do.

"You want to go out there?" the Chief asked him.

Murph shook his head.

"Yeah, I didn't think so." The Chief stood up and looked around the office. He reached into the front shirt pocket of his power plant overalls, and produced a pack of cigarettes, a soft pack, the foil torn apart. He shook the pack, peering inside, and said, "Hell, I'm almost out of cigarettes anyway. I'll go."

Relief washed over Murph, followed by a withering dose of shame. He wished he could be like the Chief, brave... calm. But he wasn't. Murph would never admit it to the Chief, but he was scared, more scared than he had ever been in his life. Death was not something that he spent of lot of his time thinking about, but now it was here, and it was literally knocking on the door.

The Chief held the pack of cigarettes out to Murph. "You want one of these before I go?"

"But what about the rules?"

The Chief smiled, a fatherly smile, and said, "Son, the moment the dead began getting up and walking around the world, I think all of the rules went right out the window. Go on. Do it."

Murph reached into the pack with a trembling hand, and as they smoked underneath the florescent lights of the control room, amid all of the twitching dials and glowing lights of the console, the Chief told him his plan. Murph nodded and shook his head, focusing on the task at hand. He would be important; he would serve as the Chief's eyes, watching his back every step along the way.

When the time was right, and their cigarettes had been ground to ash on the floor of the control room, the Chief moved to the door. He turned the lock with a trembling hand, and then yanked the door open. On the other side of the door, a familiar face greeted them. It was one of the men that had left earlier, presumably to save his family. Apparently, all he had succeeded in doing was becoming a meal for the dead. His right arm hung at his side, tendons and bone exposed where the flesh had been chewed off.

The Chief lowered his shoulder and bulldozed the man off of the metal stairs that led up to the door. Murph moved to the door, slammed it shut, and locked it. Before he closed the door all the way, he saw the Chief in full flight, dodging through the handful of dead that had gathered in the cooling tower room. He shivered with fear.

The chair squeaked as Murph plopped down in it, wheeling it closer to the console and the controls for the monitors. He followed the chief's progress on the screen. He was in the cafeteria now, scrambling over the cafeteria tables to avoid the outstretched hands of the dead. He spun out of the reach of a creature, only to spin right into the arms of a grasping woman, her ankle bent at an impossible angle. The Chief shoved the dead woman backwards, and she flew through the air and slid ten feet across the slick cafeteria floor.

Murph's heart beat in his chest, thundering underneath his sternum. He could only imagine what the Chief was feeling as he scrambled for his life. He had a sudden urge for a bowl of popcorn. The Chief made it through the cafeteria, and then bolted out the door that led to the loading docks.

Murph switched the camera with one hand, while clutching his radio in the other. On the loading docks, the dead were staggered far apart, but as the door burst open, all heads turned to the Chief as one, and the circle of the dead started tightening immediately. The Chief ran to his truck, hopped in the cab and began rooting through it, his back turned to the camera and the dead that were shuffling towards him. When a man in a flannel shirt was within three steps of The Chief, Murph hopped on the radio and said, "You got one behind you. Pretty close."

The Chief popped out of the cab and spun around, delivering a solid punch to the creature's face, and shoving it backwards, where it tumbled to the ground in a tangle of limbs. The Chief hopped back into the cab and closed the door behind him. The dead were around him now, banging on the flimsy metal of the Mazda pick-up.

"Come on, move your ass, Chief."

Inside the truck, the Chief found what he was looking for, and he fumbled with it in his lap. When he was finished, he raised his hand, and there was a flash of light as he blew out the glass of the driver's side window. One of the dead dropped to the ground, but another stepped up to take its place, its arm clawing through the broken glass.

Murph saw the Chief swing his elbow, smashing out the back window of the truck's cab, and then he was crawling through the broken glass. He stood up in the back of the truck, and waved around a revolver. He tucked it into the back of his pants, and then bent down to pick up a crowbar that was lying among the garbage and empty beer cans in the back. As the dead surged around the truck, he lashed out with the crowbar, with little effect.

The Chief took a small, running start and then leapt out of the back of the truck, landing hard upon the ground. He was on his feet in a flash, his feet pounding the dust of the yard into the air as the dead moved after him. Murph watched him run. His steps were slower, and he was tiring out. Murph pumped his fist as the chief ran past one of the dead, clocking it in the face with the tire iron. It fell to the ground, but stood back up again as the Chief ran off the camera.

Murph switched to the conveyor belt camera, and panned the camera to the side, where the mini-dozer sat unmoving, like a child's forgotten toy underneath a mountain of coal stacked higher than the camera could see. The dozer was a company vehicle on a secure lot, so the key was still in the ignition as the Chief hopped into the black driver's seat and turned the key, stomping on the gas pedal.

Murph could see that there was trouble, so he grabbed his radio and said, "What's wrong?"

The Chief ignored Murph's question, banging on the dashboard of the dozer, pounding on the gas pedal and angrily turning the key. The dead had begun to wander onto the screen, drawn by the noise of the choking engine.

"You got company, Chief. They're getting closer."

The Chief set his handgun on the dashboard within easy reach and continued to try to start the vehicle. Around the front of the dozer, the dead spread out in a semi-circle, inching closer. A black cloud of exhaust erupted from the dozer, and the Chief threw the dozer into reverse, spinning it in a wide circle. As he spun the dozer around, he brushed by one of the dead. It reached out to grab the Chief's arm, but he jerked the dozer to the side, throwing the creature to the ground and plowing into the mountain of coal. Angular chunks of coal cascaded down the side of the mountain, making walking treacherous for the dead, but still they came. At the impact, his handgun flew off of the dashboard, and Murph cursed in the control room.

The Chief operated the dozer, pushing a pile of coal ahead of it as it trundled towards the hoppers. In the process, he ran over the dead, people with familiar faces, if not names. The vehicle was slow, so it didn't kill them, but as the dozer's tracks rolled over their broken bodies, they came out the other side worse for wear and less functional than they had been before.

The Chief continued the process for four or five loads, and Murph watched as the dead's numbers dwindled, mown down by the heavy tracks of the dozer or pushed inadvertently into the hopper along with loads of coal. The dials rose slowly and the power plant began pumping out more energy.

Then disaster struck. One of the dead reaching out for the Chief missed and grabbed hold of something vital to the dozer's operation. Its arm jerked for a second as the dozer pulled away, and it came away with a rubber hose in its hand. The dozer left a dark stream of liquid as it trundled across the dusty desert ground. Murph knew something was wrong when the dozer crawled to a halt. He pressed the button on his radio and asked, "Chief, I think you got a problem. You're leaking something."

There was no answer from the Chief. He hopped out of the cab of the dozer with the tire iron in hand. He ran around the front and looked. Murph could tell right away it was bad because the Chief shook his head, and his shoulders slumped down. The Chief held his radio to his mouth and said, "It got the damn oil line. It's fucked."

"What are we going to do?" Murph asked.

"We can't do shit." A dead woman approached the Chief from behind.

"You got one behind you," he said.

"Thanks," the Chief said into the radio as he spun and delivered a one-handed blow to the woman's head with the tire iron, caving in the side of her skull and knocking her to the ground. The creature's limbs still reached for the Chief.

All the noise and excitement had brought most of the dead in the area to the Chief's position, but it didn't seem to faze him at all. "Alright. I'm coming to get you."

Murph didn't know why he said it, but he knew it was true as soon as he did. "Don't. You'll just get yourself killed."

The Chief scrambled up the side of the mountain of coal away from the dead that were after him. He looked around and then located the camera and looked straight at it as he held the radio up to his mouth. "You sure, kid? I can come get you. I don't mind."

"Nah, I'm fine. I think I'm just going to sit here. Maybe listen to the radio."

"I'll get some help. I'll be back for you. Just hang in there."

They were nice words. Murph wanted to believe them, but he knew they were just words. They had failed. "Good luck, Chief."

"Call me, Walt," the Chief sent back.

Murph laughed. What a weird name for the Chief. "Good luck, Walt."

"I'll be back," the Chief said as he scrambled sideways on the mountain of coal.

Murph leaned back in his chair, having nothing to do but stare at the dials on the console. He watched as the needles ebbed, and eventually the hum of the cooling towers ceased altogether. The lights went off in the power plant, and the monitors went black. Murph reached into his pocket and pulled out a pack of cigarettes. He probably should have told the Chief that he still had cigarettes, but it wouldn't have mattered. He pulled one from the pack and lit it up.

The banging on the door didn't bother him at all. He put his feet up on the desk, grabbed the FM radio from the console and fiddled with the channels until he found a station that was still playing music. The only one he could find was a classical station. He didn't mind this either.

He listened to the swell and rise of the music, turning it up loud to drown out the banging on the door. It was beautiful, he closed his eyes, took a puff of the cigarette and blew the smoke into the air, as his mind swirled with colors that undulated and moved to the rhythm of the music, brightening with each bang of the drums, slithering with the whine of the violins. I should have learned an instrument, he thought to himself.

Then the music died. Gone, just like that. It was his fault. He knew that. The power plant was responsible for well over 60% of Portland's power, but along the way, it fed all the small towns throughout the gorge. The power was running its last wires, like a river damned up at the source.

Portland was in for a world of hurt. He'd hate to be trapped in an elevator when the juice ran out. Murph laughed and lit his lighter. On the radio was an ancient tape deck. He pressed the eject button and pulled out the tape cassette. It was white and ancient. Cheap Trick. He laughed, put the tape cassette in the tape deck and pressed play. He closed his eyes and refused to open them, as "I Want You to Want Me" blasted on the radio. Underneath the guitars and drums, the banging outside let him know that he was indeed wanted.

Chapter 33: The Pied Piper of Portland

Ace and the boys had lived through an interesting 24 hours. They had rolled through the city, collecting refugees, calling out to them, and picking up cars and supplies. The supplies were mostly junk food and beer. The cars were mostly hot-wired, hastily brought to life by his checkered-past compadres during stops. Behind the Turtle stretched a line of cars, filled with bland, thoughtless people, people who would have rotted in their homes were it not for Ace and his merry band of liberators. They were happy to be saved, but should they be?

Behind that line of cars came a different line. The dead trailed them. They could have lost them easily, but Ace didn't want to lose them, so the convoy moved at a snail's pace. He wanted them to join in the fun. This was going to be Ace's final concert, and he wanted the entire city of Portland to be there, dead or alive.

Pudge had finished securing the amp to the roof of the Turtle, rigging it with bungee cords and some ratchet straps they had found underneath one of the benches in the back of the vehicle. The people in the back of the Turtle smiled at him, as he moved to the side to let Pudge crawl back inside via the turret. They didn't know what he was planning, and even if they did, there was nothing they could do to stop him. Ace threw the guitar over his shoulder and mounted the turret, poking his head out to see the ruins of the world around him.

The sun was going down, and shadows were taking over the city. To the west, the sun glowed a fiery orange, as it began its descent behind the hilltops that made up the Willamette Valley, Portland nestled smack dab in the middle. The sky looked like fire. Ace smiled, and felt the buzz of his guitar building as he turned all of the knobs on the amp up as high as they would go. He strummed the guitar, and sound blasted through the evening.

Smoke hung heavy in the air. Buildings burned throughout the city, and they had stopped combing the streets for survivors. Now people ran out of their houses upon seeing their convoy. Dozens of cars lined up behind them, and for anyone that was ready to go, they had plenty of time to reach one of them and board the train to safety... or so they thought.

The Turtle was great for clearing out random cars that were blocking the streets. There were times when they had to circle around particularly nasty wrecks, but for the most part, they could just shove everything out of the way if they moved slowly.

As the sun disappeared and the shadows overtook the streets, Ace caught a glimpse of the Rose Garden in the distance. That was where they were headed according to Pudge, not to the giant building that resembled a sleeping headless turtle, but to the squatty building next to it. That was where the government was. That was where the show was. It was going to be a hot ticket. He was going to blast the gates off the place.

He smiled at the image that was building in his head, an image of chaos and carnage. He climbed out of the turret and stood on top of the Turtle. He looked down at the amplifier strapped down on the roof of the vehicle. With his faded Converse shoes planted firmly on the roof of the Turtle, he struck the guitar. The noise was deafening, and his ear drums shook with the force of the amp, but he didn't care.

He didn't care about anything. He played a song, like a piper of long ago... only there were a lot more than 130 children following him, and they were going into town, not away from it.

****

Joan was busy putting salve on a rotund man's hands when the lights went out. "Shit," she said, for there was nothing else to say. The darkness lasted a few seconds, and then the emergency lighting kicked in. It was an orange light, not nearly as bright as the florescents she had been working under, and now the entire triage center was laced in shadows.

She heard her patient exhale heavily, as if he had been holding his breath for a long time. His face matched the fear that Joan felt at losing power. Joan attempted to calm him down by saying, "Freaky, right?"

The man looked as if he was on the verge of tears. His eyes were filled with a watery shine that could spill onto his cheek at any moment. Without warning, Clara appeared, skidding to a stop on the concrete floor. From the corner of her eye, she saw the patient reach up to his face and wipe his eyes.

Clara strode across the floor, oblivious to the presence of the patient. "This is not good."

"I'm sure it will come back on in a second. The Army will figure something out," Joan said, more to calm the patient than anything else.

"Are you blind, Joan? They are barely keeping this place together. What makes you think that they can get the power back on?"

"She has a point," the man said.

Joan didn't bother to acknowledge his presence. "What do you want me to do about it?"

"We've got to get out of here."

Joan had heard this before. As soon as they had made it to the Coliseum, Clara had started working on figuring out a way out of the place. "There's no place to go, Clara."

"Any place is better than here. What happens when we run out of food? What happens when those fences come down? What happens when those soldiers go from being assholes to being sadistic assholes?"

Joan shrugged her shoulders and admitted defeat. "You're right. Of course, you're right. We'd be better out there on our own, fighting off the thousands of dead with our bare hands. Is that what you want?"

"I may know a way out," the man said. They listened as the man, whose name was Rudy, detailed the plan that had been told to him only that morning.

"Do you think they'll let us go with you?" Joan asked.

"I don't see why not," he said.

"It's worth a shot. It's not like anyone else is offering us a chance for survival."

"Great," Rudy said. "Follow me."

****

The night deepened, and outside the Coliseum, a sound could be heard over the thousands of dead, wailing. It was a harsh sound, starting faint at first. Then as the sound came closer, those inside the Coliseum could hardly believe what they were hearing. It was music, the harsh, distorted twangs of a guitar being played at lightning-fast speed. The soldiers stood dumbfounded as one of their own vehicles approached, a train of cars following behind, the vehicles' headlights shining in their eyes.

They stopped at the edge of the sea of dead, and the man stood on top of the vehicle, playing like a mad man. The music built, until it seemed the man's hands would fall off. By now, refugees from inside had filed out to see what the commotion was. No one noticed as a group of people split off from those watching the impromptu concert. No one cared.

The man played and played, and the dead began to shift away from the fences, drawn to the skinny man in the leather jacket, standing on top of a Stryker and giving the performance of his life. The soldiers cheered, causing a scattered handful of the dead to turn in their direction once more. But the main mass of the dead continued heading towards the guitar-playing madman. He smiled at them, lit up by the massive, generator-powered spotlights that the soldiers had erected just in case the Coliseum lost power.

Then the song was over. The soldiers stood, looking at the man... wondering what he was going to do next. They didn't have to wait for long. As he popped back into the Stryker, a voice came over the loudspeaker of the vehicle.

"Martial law is over. We, the people, declare our independence."

Major Miller was standing in the courtyard, trying to understand what was going on, when the turret on the Stryker erupted. Bright flashes appeared from the muzzle of the fifty caliber machine gun, and the Stryker accelerated. The machine gun sent rotting body parts arcing through the air, and the Stryker's wheels bounced over the dead that it mowed down.

With the aid of the machine gun and its own crushing momentum, the Stryker cut a swath of destruction through the dead and was at the fence in no time. It didn't stop at the fence as the crowd in the Coliseum's courtyard expected. Instead it barreled forward, fifty caliber shells ripping through the fence, the soldiers, and the refugees on the other side.

The soldiers opened fire on the Stryker as it lurched across the courtyard, launching the bodies of the living into the air. The Stryker turned in a tight circle, sparks erupting from its armored plating as soldiers fired at the vehicle. Then it plowed through the other side of the chain link fence, ripping it down, and opening up a hundred-foot gap in the Coliseum's defenses. The vehicle was a knife, slashing its way across the refugees' throats. Then it was gone, shooting off into the night, dripping blood and leaving the soldiers scrambling to plug the hole as hordes of the dead poured through the gap.

****

Lieutenant General McCutcheon was in the comms room when he heard Major Miller's panicked communiqué. It was hard to hear the words over the machine gun fire in the background, but he understood the gist.

As soon as the Major was done talking, McCutcheon scrambled his troops. The choppers wouldn't be much use in the dark, but at the very least, they could get some of his men, and maybe the refugees out of there. McCutcheon stood on the apron of the terminal, squinting his eyes to protect them from debris as he watched the choppers take off.

****

When the guitar-playing madman had first shown up, Blake had tapped Mort on the shoulder and pointed at a group of people hurrying away from all of the commotion. Blake hastily scribbled the words, "Let's follow," on a notepad. Mort nodded his agreement, and as usual, Blake took the lead.

Blake had been mostly silent for the entire day. To Mort, he seemed like a man trapped inside of his own head, aching to get out but not knowing how. As far as Mort could tell, there was no improvement in Blake's hearing. But his eyesight was still 100%.

Blake walked slowly ahead of Mort, his back hunched over, and his feet sliding silently across the concourse floor. Mort wondered exactly what it is they were doing. Blake hugged the wall, and Mort did the same. Ahead of them the group of people was moving much faster than they were. They watched as the group ducked into a side door. Blake held his hand up, and then, after a few seconds, he waved Mort on. They pulled open the door and crept down a set of dimly lit stairs.

The emergency lighting made it difficult to see, and as they reached the bottom of the stairwell, Blake leaned around the corner. Mort leaned around with him, peering down the shadowy hallway of the lower level. If the upper-level could be said to be Spartan, the lower level made the upper level look absolutely cozy.

The walls were white, criss-crossed with exposed wiring and the gleam of steel pipes. The ceiling was more of that cold concrete that made up the upper concourse, gray and spiderwebbed with cracks. At the end of the hall, just around the curve, they saw the group of people moving quietly down the hallway, purpose in their stride. Mort thought he recognized the doctor that had worked on Blake.

They crept along until the group came upon a door. From down the hall, they heard a man say, "Let's bust this bitch wide open." Then there was a banging sound. The hall filled with a loud ringing that echoed off the concrete walls.

Blake scribbled something on his notepad and handed it to Mort. For the last day, Mort had been communicating with Blake solely through writing. Mort was out of practice. He had never been much of a reader in school, and once he had hit the roads and railways, all he ever had a chance to read was random bits of graffiti splattered on the railway cars, and most of that was unintelligible. He took the notepad and read Blake's words. "What are they doing?" he had written.

Mort took Blake's pen and wrote, "They're trying to break down a door." He handed the pad back to Blake, and he read the words. He shook his head, and they waited. There was a loud crash from around the bend; it sounded as if they had finally succeeded in breaking open the door. The voices down the hallway became more muted, and Mort assumed they had entered the room. He stepped in front of Blake and leaned around the curving wall of the concourse to see a soldier approaching the room from the opposite direction, his rifle in his hand.

Mort leaned back, and listened. Blake grabbed his shoulder and held the notepad out to him. Mort scribbled "SOLJER" on the notepad and handed it to Blake. Around the corner, Mort heard a man, shout, "Freeze!"

There were words from inside of the room, but Mort couldn't make out any of them. Without warning, Blake took off down the hallway, running as quiet as a man could in cowboy boots. The soldier heard Blake before he saw him, but by then it was too late. Blake dove and tackled the man to the ground, pressing the gun to his chest. They fought on the ground, and Mort cursed at his own cowardly paralysis.

The swearing kicked him into action, and then he was there, right next to Blake. He didn't want to do it, and he felt awful about it, but he kicked the soldier in the head. The soldier went still immediately, his eyes rolling in the back of his head and his arms locking into a frozen position. Mort's hands came to his face, and he looked around apologetically. "I didn't want to," he said.

The doctor came over and dropped to her knees. "Is he dead?" Mort asked.

Blake stood up, pulling the rifle from the man's hands. He patted Mort on the shoulder and said, "Thanks."

The doctor looked up at him, and said, "He's going to be alright, but his face will probably never look the same." Mort could already see the swelling on the side of the man's cheek. He didn't like what he had done, so he turned and focused on the room.

The room was filled with all sorts of weaponry, guns, knives, even a couple of swords that had been confiscated from refugees. The group of people that they had followed were gearing up, picking up weapons, scrounging for ammunition, and shoving whatever they could in their pockets.

"Hell yeah," Blake said as he strolled over to a table and lifted up a gunny sack full of weapons and peered inside. To Mort, he looked like a redneck Santa Claus. The bag was full of the weapons the soldiers had confiscated from Mort as soon as they had loaded Blake onto the helicopter. Blake set the bag on the floor and rooted through it. He smiled for the first time since he had lost his hearing as he held up his hunting rifle. He admired it as if he had just discovered the Holy Grail, and then he held it up to his lips and kissed it. Mort watched as he first loaded it  and then flung the rifle over his shoulder. "Grab that bag, and pick out a gun, man," Blake said to him.

Mort did as he was told, although he knew next to nothing about guns. A tall white man spoke to him as he attempted to load some bullets into a handgun. "You guys looking to get out of here?"

Mort looked at the man, smiled, and said, "You show me the way, and I'm right there with you."

"You know how to use that thing?" the man asked him.

"Not really," Mort said.

"Here," the man held out his hand, and Mort handed him the gun. He cocked the slide, showed Mort where the safety was, and then handed the gun back to him. "Just aim and squeeze."

Blake stood guard at the door, his rifle in his hands. Mort was loaded down with a bag full of guns and ammo, and the gun in his hands felt like a living thing. He looked around the room and saw that everyone else was armed as well. Adrenaline shot through him, and Mort understood that this was the way out. This was how he was going to survive. He smiled in the gloomy room.

"Let's go," the white man said.

****

They followed him, weapons in their hands.

On the main concourse, hell had erupted. Zeke and his group emerged from the lower level of the concourse to find it overrun with the dead. Outside, helicopters were firing into a seething mass of the dead. Inside, the dead were advancing. Soldiers who had spent all of their ammo were swinging their rifles like baseball bats. Refugees were pushing and shoving with their hands, trying to keep the dead off of them. Some of them were successful, most of them were not.

The group attempted to head out of the main doors, but the mass of people there was too confusing, too mixed up with the dead. They couldn't even fire their weapons among all of the confusion. The emergency lights created shadows that made it hard to tell who was alive and who wasn't. They retreated in the other direction, heading to the backside of the Coliseum. Refugees and soldiers flooded around them, but the dead were not there yet.

Zeke looked for an emergency exit sign. All thoughts of hopping in a Stryker went out the window the moment he saw the wall of dead that were coming their way. How many were there? He had no time to ponder the odds they were facing, as an emergency exit loomed ahead of them, its lights glowing red in the gloom of the concourse.

"Hey!" a voice yelled as Zeke reached the door. Zeke spun around, the automatic rifle he had confiscated at the ready. It was Private Bryant. "Where are you going?"

Zeke smiled at the man. "Away from here. If you were smart, you'd come with us."

Private Bryant thought about it, but Zeke could see the duty in his heart tugging at the logic in his mind. "I can't," he said.

"Suit yourself. Good luck," Zeke said as he kicked open the door to the emergency exit. With that, the group turned their back on Private Bryant, and pounded down a stairwell. Lou gave the Private a lone wave of thanks, and then the door clanged shut behind them.

 Zeke felt sorry for Private Bryant. He was, like a lot of the soldiers dying in the Coliseum, a good man. He would have been useful. But that was life in the military. He had his orders, and he was going to follow through on them. Zeke's only order was to keep himself alive. If he could save some others in the process, well, then that was good too.

Chapter 34: Saint Bryant

Private Bryant's last moments were a nightmare. He watched as the group disappeared through the door, taking with them his last best chance for survival. Other refugees fled through the door, but the majority ran wide-eyed into the arena. He knew that staying in the Coliseum was a death sentence, but he chose it anyway.

Standing on the concourse, he pulled his M4 up to ready position as refugees flowed around him like a river. He called to soldiers as they ran past, and flicked the selector on his rifle to semi-automatic. Bryant looked down the sight of his rifle, and lined the red dot up with the forehead of an Annie. He squeezed the trigger, and its brains exploded on the concrete wall of the Coliseum. Another one took its place, and he fired again. Some running soldiers skidded to a stop next to him, and they did the same, his calm spreading to the soldiers around him.

He concentrated on his breathing. Though his heart was trying to beat its way out of his chest, he breathed in through his nose and out through his mouth, squeezing the trigger on the exhale. Still the tide advanced. The line of soldiers shuffled backwards now, the sound of rifle fire smacking off of the concrete walls, and he could hear nothing.

He saw the emergency exit slide by on his right as he moved backwards. He should have gone with them; he saw that now. His rifle was empty, so he pulled the magazine out and slapped another one home.

Private Bryant screamed and spun as he bumped into something behind him. It was another soldier. The dead had encircled the entire arena. The soldiers looked at each other, resignation in their eyes. On the other side of the soldier, another wall of the dead was approaching. They were going to be sandwiched between two masses of the dead. The soldiers funneled backwards through an entrance to the arena floor, their rifles firing away. They shuffled backwards down the stairs as the Annies advanced.

If they had managed to kill with every single bullet they had, they might have had a chance, but they missed quite often. Bryant counted himself a fair shot, but he was only taking one down for every two shots fired.

He looked over his shoulder as he backed down the concrete steps that led to the floor of the arena. He imagined that this was what hell looked like. The refugees, what few there were left, huddled in the center of the arena with no place left to go. All around the arena, the dead streamed in from the entrances. In the distance, they looked like trains of slow moving ants.

Bryant and the other soldiers backed up, firing and killing as many of them as they could, but he could see that it wasn't going to be enough. His fears were confirmed when he pulled the trigger and nothing happened. He felt his pockets for a fresh magazine, but he had used them all up.

The soldier next to him, tapped him on the shoulder and handed him a magazine. He dropped the spent one and slammed the last one home. The dead were hungry. They wanted him. They wanted them all. Bryant looked to the sky, begging for help from someone, anyone. God... the devil... a giant space peanut, he would take assistance from anyone or anything. There was no answer.

Bryant spun on his heel, the rifle in hand, and he approached the refugees, leaving his brethren behind. "Who wants to die?" he yelled.

The refugees looked at him, fear on their faces. Tears ran down their faces.  A child clung to his mother's jeans. Then it dawned on the refugees exactly what he was offering. A woman raised her hand, and Bryant did what he had to do. He did what he was sworn to do. He protected the woman from becoming one of them. One squeeze of the trigger and she was saved. The refugees crowded around him, volunteering for the easy way out, volunteering to go to the afterlife with no blood on their hands, and without having experienced the painful sensation of human teeth tearing at their flesh.

"You're a saint," they said as they lined up in front of the muzzle of his rifle.

The line went quick, and when his rifle clicked empty he shrugged in apology at the remaining refugees. He looked around the arena and saw that they were surrounded. There was no way out. He flipped his rifle around, and swung at the first Annie that approached him. He connected solidly with the rifle, but the creature still came. He swung again, knocking it to the ground. His arms and hands stung from the impact.

All around him, the people fought for their lives. He stumbled over one of the bodies he had executed, and went to the ground. The dead lay on top of him, grasping and squeezing at his body. He grit his teeth as they crushed his arms and legs in their fervor. Screams filled the arena floor, and then the lights went out for good as the emergency lights of the Coliseum died.

Private Bryant heaved one last time, freeing himself from the Annie that was on his chest. He rose, kicking and punching. He didn't know if he was punching the living or the dead. None of it mattered. He walked over soft chunks of flesh, unmoving beneath his feet, pushing and shoving his way through the nightmare. Screaming among the screams. Grunting, heaving, fighting for every last breath. In the darkness a rifle exploded, and he moved toward the source of light. Someone was still alive. Someone was still fighting, just like him. Arms groped around him as he swam through the sea of the dead, towards the source of the rifle fire.

"Fire in the hole!" a voice yelled, and there was a clank to his left. The world lit with a brilliant white light. He had no time to blink as shrapnel tore through his body. It was over quick. When he rose again, he felt no pain. He stumbled about in the darkness, hungry.

Chapter 35: Into the Night

Katie was in the middle of the pack. Behind her, she could hear Brian's labored breathing as they pounded down the stairwell. When they reached the bottom, they readied themselves, with Zeke taking the lead. Katie watched him, desire in her heart, as he pushed open the door.

The door opened onto the loading docks underneath the backside of the Coliseum, and the sight was anything but calming. While not completely jammed full of the dead, it was going to be a tough slog to get out of there. They moved through the door, their feet shuffling them over the concrete. Zeke was the first to fire, and she saw one of the dead drop to the ground. As if he had given the order, the rest of the group opened fire as well. Katie brought up her handgun, the one that Fred Walker had given her, and she lined the sight up with the head of a hulking white man, his eye hanging by a scrap of flesh. Her shot missed the eye, but buried itself neatly in his forehead.

They advanced through the covered area, mowing the dead down as if it were a walk in the park. Behind her, Katie could hear Brian's snot-nosed whelp shrieking in terror. She glanced over her shoulder to see Brian's sweaty face, shining in the moonlight, his child's face buried in his shoulder. The sound grated on her ears, and she wanted nothing more than to turn around and put a bullet through the brat's head. This wasn't a world for children. It wasn't a world for family either. She bit her lower lip and fired again, as the group stepped out from underneath the overhang of the loading dock's roof.

The sky was clear, lit by a sliver of moon, which was good because the streetlights were out, and the city was a mass of darkness, seething with the dead. She shivered, as they shot their way through the throng of the dead surrounding the Coliseum.

They were almost on the other side of the mass when disaster struck. The worried wailing and whimpering of Brian's child had changed; it was now more of a shriek. She turned around to see Brian gnawing on the child's neck. Blood flowed from her wound, and his beard was turning a true red color. Without thinking, she aimed her pistol at his head and shot him dead. His long lanky body collapsed to the pavement, and the girl rolled from his arms.

Blood shone black in the moonlight as Katie stood over the injured girl. Her teenage sister was there, placing her hands over the wound in her neck, and putting up a fuss. Katie looked around to see the others gathered in a circle, the dead approaching them. Their weapons were at their sides, and they all seemed lost. Katie did what she thought was right, what the cold-hearted presence that had taken root in her chest told her to do. She shoved the older girl to the side with her shoe, and then fired a bullet through the brain of her sister.

"Let's move," she yelled, as if she had just stopped to tie her shoelace. The looks from the others in the group bothered her, but not enough to stand there and become a meal for the dead that were encircling them.

****

Lou picked up Jane, pulling her away from all that remained of her family. Now they were just two more slabs of meat lying in the road. If he had been inclined, he could have left her there, and let the entire family tree turn brown and die right there. Yet, he didn't. He never wanted to see people hurt, and he had seen so much of it over the last couple of days. He grabbed the girl and threw her over his shoulder, where she lay like a dead fish sobbing her sister's name.

He tapped Zeke on the chest as he ran by, and they moved through the crowd, firing into the dead. They were wandering, spun off from the Coliseum like a spark looking to take hold in the night sky, trying to find a place to light before it turned dark forever.

Katie ran ahead of them, in the front, her revolver blazing away. After every six shots, she would drop back and refill the revolver with bullets from her pocket, quick, efficient, and heartless, the way she had been back at the road next to the Coliseum. Where were they going?

They moved east, away from the river, sticking to the middle of the road. There were cars abandoned everywhere, but the dead thinned out ahead of them. They could move around them now without firing, but there was no way that they would be able to stop. The girl over his shoulder was heavy, and he knew that she would have to run with them sooner or later. They had gone three blocks, uphill, and he wasn't yet recovered from his flight from two days before, when they had escaped the tenement. The muscles in his thighs already burned.

He could see that some of the others were in much the same shape. The other black man in the group, the one that had the telltale signs of homelessness about him, was hop-limping up the road, a heavy bag of guns thrown over his shoulder. The white cowboy stuck close to his side, his head constantly scanning from side to side. Zeke moved forward calmly, he seemed indestructible.

To his right, he saw Rudy huffing and puffing, digging in his bag for something, and Lou thought, He isn't long for this world. Except for Clara, Joan's somewhat hobbled friend, the women of the group seemed to be in much better condition than the men. Funny how that worked.

"Hey!" he yelled to the girl slung over his shoulder. Her sobbing had lessened, and her arms hung slack. "Hey!" he yelled again. "You think you can walk? We're never going to make it if I have to carry you the whole way." The others looked over at him, the small bit of conversation seeming out of place among their mostly silent group as they weaved around the dead.

The girl said nothing. "I need you to wake up, girl. This is life or death now; we ain't got time to be sad."

"Shhh," Katie yelled at him from the front of the group. Lou didn't appreciate the command to be quiet. He was about to say something, when a sudden noise shut him up. It was the sound of engines. They held their ground as the sound became louder, and that's when they saw it, the vehicle that had destroyed the fences, rounding the corner, its headlights shining directly on them. There was a line of cars following the vehicle, less than there had been at the Coliseum. Lou hoped that they had lost a good amount of people.

Lou set the girl down on the ground, and said, "Playtime's over, girl."

"Be ready," Zeke hissed.

Chapter 36: Not Enough Beer to Go Around

After they had torn down the fence, they had circled away from the Coliseum. Ace stood in the turret, trying to make sense of everything that was going on. At that point, he wished he could fly up in the air, grab a bucket of popcorn, and watch the carnage. He couldn't see everything, but the things that he could see were hilarious to him. First, he knew that the rescue center was thoroughly fucked.

The Turtle bounced and rocked as they drove wherever the hell they pleased. Slutty Rivets wheeled the vehicle about, and Ace watched as the line of cars they had brought with them, slowed to a crawl, damaged by the bodies they were smacking into, stalling on piles of bodies, and generally driving to their own doom. There had been some thirty cars, and as they circled around, Ace liked to imagine that he could see their faces through the windows of their vehicles, cursing him for leading him to their death. They were fools for following him.

He heard shattered glass, gunfire and screaming, a symphony of death that was music to his ears. They sat in a grassy strip away from the Coliseum, but close enough to see what was going on. The giant floodlights showed him a roiling mass of arms, heads and limbs advancing upon the soldiers in front of the Coliseum.

The soldiers fired their guns. The line of cars achieved varying levels of success in escaping the Coliseum, and they stacked up behind him, still intent upon following him to their own doom, though he had already led half of the to their death. Ace cared nothing for them; he was merely interested in seeing how long they would stick around. The majority of them had believed that they were going to the refugee center for safety, and that Ace was some sort of apocalyptic hero trying to save as many people as he could.

Ace laughed atop the Turtle. Ace didn't save people. It was up to people to save themselves. He was safe, he was insane, and he was chaos. As he watched the confusion and the mess, a white sedan broke free from the dead, zooming past the Turtle. Where would they go? The answer came to him instantly. Nowhere.

Ace maneuvered the turret on the machine gun and blew the car apart. Its tires popped, and the rounds from the fifty caliber machine gun mowed through the car as if it were made from cheap foil. The car swerved into a concrete divider and tipped up on its side. He watched, as a man inside struggled to get out of the vehicle. He heaved himself out of the driver side window, and stood on top of the car, looking around to see what had happened.

He spotted the Turtle's headlights, and it was as if the man instantly knew who was responsible for his situation. Ace waved at him, before he pulled the triggers of the machine gun again. The man was blown to pieces and Ace laughed.

"You're a madman, Ace," Slutty Rivets yelled from inside the Turtle.

"Don't you forget it!" he yelled back.

From somewhere, a new noise emerged. It wasn't the screaming of the dead, the occasional honking of a horn from someone fighting for their life strapped into their car, or the muted gunfire of the soldiers inside the Coliseum. "That's our signal!" Ace yelled over the noise, as a helicopter appeared in the night sky.

Ace banged on the roof of the Turtle, and it lurched into motion, causing him to bash into the back of the machine gun turret. It was pain, but pain wasn't necessarily a bad thing, just something to remind you that you were still alive, unlike the poor bastards in the Coliseum.

Ace sat on the metal bench in the back of the Turtle, a smile on his face and a cigarette in his hand. Pudge handed him a beer, and asked, "How was it?"

Ace didn't have the word for it, so he said, "It's like when you're with a woman, and you get to that point, and POP!" Ace held up his fist and mimicked an exploding gesture. "You know what I mean?"

"Orgasmic?"

"Sure," Ace said. "I like that. Orgasmic."

****

Ace was drinking from a warm beer when Slutty Rivets yelled, "We got some action up here. Looks like some rats are trying to leave the sewer."

Ace drained the rest of the contents in the red, white, and blue can, crushed it, and tossed it on the ground where it clanged off the deck of the Turtle. He then moved to look out the front window of the vehicle. In front was a group of people, their eyes round with fear, their bodies covered in sweat. They were bathed in the headlights of the Turtle. Behind the Turtle, the cars were stacking up. There were maybe ten left according to Pudge, who actually seemed to care about these things.

"What do you think?" Slutty Rivets asked.

"There's not enough beer to go around," Ace said. "Run them over."

"You're a sick fuck," Spider said while laughing.

"The world's sick. We're the cure," Ace said.

Slutty Rivets threw the vehicle into drive, and stepped on the accelerator. Ace grabbed a handle that was riveted to the steel frame of the vehicle, as the tires squealed on the ground. He smiled again, and then the Stryker exploded.

Chapter 37: The Third Time is the Charm

Zeke stood ready to move. Whoever was behind the wheel of the Stryker was not the type of person that could be trusted. They stood there, waiting. And then Zeke heard it, the telltale sound of rotors chopping air at 292 revolutions per minute. It was close, and behind the buildings in the distance, he saw an Apache appear.

Then two things happened at once. The apache flashed a bright orange as the Stryker's tires began to squeal.

"Get down!" Zeke yelled, shoving his band of survivors to the side. Zeke watched as the tires bit into the asphalt and the Stryker lurched forward, and then it exploded into a hail of metal and shrapnel.

The concussion of the blast knocked him backwards, through the air, but it wasn't fast enough to prevent an inch-thick piece of the Stryker's armored plating from catching up to him and puncturing his abdomen. He landed on the ground, the air knocked out of him, and a piece of jagged metal sticking out of his stomach.

He tasted blood in his mouth, and he couldn't see out of his left eye. He lay down on his back and watched as the Apache banked around to his right and began firing on the line of cars behind the Stryker. The sky lit up like the 4th of July as cars exploded in geysers of flame and metal. He mused, Would there ever be another 4th of July?

Then the pain hit him. It wasn't the type of pain that says, "Hey, you're hurt, but if you slow down, you'll be alright." This was the type of pain that said, "You're hurt real bad, but your body is shutting down now. It'll all be over in a bit."

He rested his head on the pavement, still warm from the day's heat. He listened to the exploding of cars, the chop of the apache, and the screams in the night. His legs seemed to not exist.

Then hands were lifting him up. Lou was there, his face a cloud of concern. Katie was there too, her eyes cold and hard. Zeke was sad he wasn't going to be there to break that hardness down.

They stood him up and draped his shoulders over Lou and the cowboy. Blake he'd said his name was. Zeke wondered if the man's hearing would ever come back. They ran down the street, Zeke's feet dangling uselessly, bumping and scraping across the pavement, dragging through pieces of shrapnel and bits of burnt and charred flesh.

His head lolled from side to side. On one side, he saw a row of flaming cars, burning in the night. On the other side, he saw a horde of the dead advancing towards them, their slow, plodding progress unfazed by the helicopter above as it dropped metal shell casings onto the pavement with each pass. The smell was familiar. War smell, drifting through the summer night.

Time stopped for Zeke, and he saw it all. His life was spread before him, like a picnic blanket set with memories. Over here, in an ice bucket was the first woman he'd slept with, skinny, breasts that were barely there, a starter chick if ever there was one. On the other side resting on a plate was a small picture of his father, beer breath and shirtless in the July sun. Around the blanket, the dead crawled like ants, small, unceasing, and ready to devour every single memory he had ever had.

When he came to, he was lying on the ground, people around him. There were no tears for him. They hadn't gotten that far. They were sad, muted, but there would be no tears for his passing. If only he had enough time, then maybe he could have built those relationships, made up for the years of time he had frittered away polishing guns, drinking beer, and making sure his lawn was green.

"What are you guys looking at? You act like you've never seen anyone die before." He laughed, coughing on his own blood. Then he was gone.

****

Lou watched Zeke pass. His last words... man that was hard. He would miss the man. When Zeke was there, he always felt like everything was going to be alright, like nothing could stop the man. He was like the fucking Terminator, muscles, brains, hell, he even had the looks. Now he was gone, and the truth dawned on everyone, as if at once... If he can die, then so can we.

Conversation was at a minimum. They sat in silence, ten survivors in a world that was quickly running out of them, and they were trapped at ground zero. What was the next step? What were they going to do? Without Zeke, there was no leadership. There was no nothing. He was the common denominator. They were fractured, spinning in a void with no end in sight that didn't include winding up in the teeth of the dead.

Thoughts of suicide slid across his mind. Lou looked at the girl he had carried, her emotionless face, the sadness buried deep inside of her. How would she ever recover? Three days ago, she was living in an apartment in Portland with a sister, a mother, and a father. Hell, she probably even had grandparents, maybe some uncles, aunts and cousins. Now she had nothing. She had Lou, an ex-hustler who never amounted to anything. She had Katie, the cold bitch that had gunned down her father and sister in the name of survival. She had Rudy, 300 pounds of meat with asthma, just waiting for death to come calling. A homeless man, a cowboy, a doctor, and an aspiring lawyer for a justice system that had all but become extinct.

He squeezed his eyes shut. His head was beginning to hurt.

"Lou."

He didn't want to hear it.

"Lou."

Go away.

"Lou!"

He heard the rustling of the fabric, the low moan, and he died a little inside. When he opened his eyes, Zeke was there, his one good eye open, his arms rising off the ground as if they were tied to puppet strings. Rudy handed him the sword he had liberated from the pile of confiscated weapons in the Coliseum. Lou felt its weight in his hands, a heavy weight, the weight of a friend. He swung the blade in a sideways motion, like a baseball player. It caught on the thick bones in Zeke's neck, and Lou struggled to pull it free, putting his foot on Zeke's chest and tugging with all his might.

Zeke's head lolled to the side, black blood oozing down the side of his neck. Lou swung again, and the head hung a little further. He was able to pull the sword free with just his hands this time, and the old adage proved true. The third time was the charm. Zeke's head rolled onto the floor.

Lou looked around at the people around him. Their faces were slack, sad, hopeless. They were all going to die in here, a movie theater shrouded in darkness. Outside, the dead banged on the doors. If only the electricity were on, they could put on a movie and take their minds off the dead snarling in the hallway.

Lou spotted motion out of the corner of his eye. "Goddamit!" he yelled, as he stabbed downward at the still moving head. The sword went into Zeke's remaining good eye, and it was finally still.

The banging outside intensified.

Chapter 38: We All Fall Down

In the comms room, the report came in. The Coliseum was lost. By the time the helicopters had gotten there, their guns were of little use. The soldiers, outmanned and with their defenses blown wide open, had held for a while, but eventually, the tide of the dead had broken over them and they were forced inside the Coliseum.

The Coliseum was crawling with Annies, and the Apaches were now on their way home, but not before they had destroyed the convoy that was responsible for getting 2,000 of McCutcheon's men killed. The pilots reported that the zone was too hot to attempt a rescue without blowing the lid off of the Coliseum. Three thousand soldiers... eaten. The thought shook him, worse than any tragedy he had ever experienced in his long career with the army.

"Jesus Christ," he said as he folded his hands on top of his head and looked at the ceiling. At that moment, he was no longer a general. He was a man experiencing the worst that the world had to offer. He left the comms room without a word and stepped outside of Warehouse #206, waiting for the rest of his boys to get back.

From the roof of the warehouse, he could hear the snipers' rifles popping with regularity in the night, no doubt assisted by night vision scopes. It was somewhat comforting, except for the fact that the pops were coming all too often. McCutcheon pulled a cigarette from his pocket, put it to his lips and smoked it.

Over the noise of the pops from the roof, McCutcheon could hear the rotors of the Apaches as they returned. He shielded his eyes as they set down, and he ground out the end of his cigarette with his fingers, tossing it on the ground. He was watching the men disembark, when one of the communications officers caught his attention.

"Sir, there will be a communiqué from POTUS in one hour."

"Yeah? Well record it for me. I need to talk to my boys."

McCutcheon walked onto the pavement, and left the communications officer behind. Whatever the message was it could wait. He wanted to talk to the men that had run the mission. As the apaches' rotors fell victim to gravity and friction, he walked up to the nearest one and greeted the pilot as he began to undo the straps on his harness. "How was it out there?"

The pilot looked at him, a blank look on his face. "It was FUBAR, sir."

"Come again."

"There was nothing we could do by the time we got there. The Annies had overrun the place. We couldn't land, we couldn't even fire, for fear of killing our own, sir."

"Do you think they made it?"

"Sir, I don't think so, sir. There were too many of them. Even if we had opened fire, we would have run out of ammunition trying to take them out, sir."

The news was worse than McCutcheon had imagined. "Get yourself squared away. Tomorrow, we start thinning out the herd."

"Yes, sir."

McCutcheon wasn't a chain-smoker by any means, but the news left him wanting another one. He gave in to the temptation, and walked back inside the warehouse. The whole situation bothered him, but the thing that bothered him the most was how ineffective the whole operation was. There weren't enough soldiers, and they were spread too thin. But how do you fight something that kept popping up at every turn, like some sort of deadly whack-a-mole game? Portland wasn't his biggest regret; it was lost and he knew it. His biggest regret is that he had been away from his family while trying to save the families of others, and he had lost everything in the process... Portland, his wife, and his daughter. All he had was the cigarette in his hand and some semblance of authority.

"Shit," he said as he tossed the cigarette into the coffee cup where it hissed itself to silence. He dozed at his desk until the communications officer shook him by the shoulder. He looked at the solider with fire in his eyes, but to his credit, the officer didn't slink away. "What?"

"You need to see this, sir."

The communications officer had a look on his face that would stick in McCutcheon's mind for the rest of his days. It was the face a child might make when told that Santa didn't exist... because he had been executed by his own elves for unsafe labor practices. It was the face one makes when they realize that all hope is gone, and nothing was going to get better.

McCutcheon rose from his chair, cracked his back, and stood up. There were more people than usual in the comms room, and McCutcheon shouldered his way past the radio jockeys, satellite uplink personnel, and the eggheads who worked on encryption software so that no one who was listening would be able to make heads or tails of what was coming in and going out of the comms room... not that there were a whole heck of a lot of people listening these days.

Their jaws were slack, and most of them sported the same look as the officer who had woken him up. He saw what they were looking at, took a second to lock onto the words that were being spoken, and then he too produced the same face.

****

It was The Speech. In the days that would come, as the world dwindled and humans fought to avoid the same fate as the dinosaurs, the dodo bird, and dial-up internet, the few remaining people would remember it as the day that The President gave a eulogy for the entire world. Those cities that still had power, but little else, were allowed to view the message on their TV's. Those cities that didn't have power would never hear the words, but they would spread by mouth. It was the day of all days, the day the world stopped pretending it could recover. Everyone in the military would see it, those that weren't dead or walking around the world trying to eat others.

Over campfires, survivors would stoop and whisper to each other in hushed tones that wouldn't attract any of the dead, "Did you hear The Speech?"

This is how it went:

The President appeared, a thin man from Jackson, Mississippi... gray around his temples that hadn't been there in the first two years of service. He had a preacher's face. He was not what one would call handsome, more... authoritarian, like those austere and severe photos of the Founding Fathers disseminated in textbooks.

On this day, he was dressed all in black. He stood in front of gray, nondescript walls built from cold, unforgiving cinder blocks. He stood not in behind a fancy podium with the Presidential Seal on it, but behind a plain lectern like one you might find in a second-rate community college. Sweat stood on his brow, and he wore no make-up so that the viewers could clearly see the bruisish bags under his eyes. He did not smile. He was not trying to get re-elected. He spoke as himself, honestly, perhaps since the first time he had run for public office in middle school.

"We all fall down from time to time. For years, the human mantra has been 'We will get back up.' It's a good mantra, and it worked for a while. My advisors have apprised me of the situation in the United States and throughout the entire world. Many of you watching this can look out your window and see the situation with your own eyes. You don't need me to tell you that it's not looking good.

Some of you have been waiting for us, the government, perhaps even myself to right the ship. Well, I'm here today to tell you that it's simply not going to happen. We all fall down, even governments... even myself."

The President held his hand up to show a wound. By now, everyone could recognize the familiar shape of a human bite.

"My advisors have recommended one last-ditch effort at saving the United States. They want me to unleash our own nuclear arsenal on the United States. They want me to drop bombs on the heaviest population centers, destroying a good portion of the country and the reanimated that now infest it."

The President paused as if to let the words sink in, and for everyone trapped in a large city, the words did sink in.

"But knowing what I know now, now that my own time has come, I simply can't follow through on their recommendation. If there was a way for me to fight this, I would do so until my very last breath. I will not rob Americans of that same opportunity. So I say to you, the people that have made this life so worth living, we all fall down... but now it's time to get up and fight."

Hope filled those that were listening, a resolve that many hadn't felt since the Twin Towers fell. The country had never been as united as it had since that fateful day... and yet only five percent of the surviving population had the opportunity to even see The Speech.

"Martial law is over. I want to thank our armed forces for sacrificing and defending this country and its citizens. Now it's time to take care of yourselves and your own families. The government is dead, the military is disbanded, and it is up to each of us to defend ourselves in the manner that we best see fit. Good luck to you all. I only wish I would be there to see it all en, and to see the human race triumph over the greatest challenge we've ever faced. Good night, and may God watch over us all."

The camera cut, but the sound did not. A hollow voice appeared as if from the depths of a tin can, "You want us to do it now?"

The President's voice crisp and clear responded, "I'll do it myself. Give me the damn gun."

There was silence, and then a click. The President spoke one last time, "Tell my wife and daughter I love them, and try and keep them safe." The boom of the gun blew out the microphone that The President was using, but it didn't matter. No one else would be speaking. Showtime was over, and around the country, soldiers and citizens turned off their TV sets, hoping that they could be as brave as The President was in his final moments.

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This Rotten World:

Let It Burn

By Jacy Morris

Here is a sneak preview:

THIS ROTTEN WORLD: LET IT BURN

Prologue

Lou sat on the roof of the movie theater. In normal times, it would have been considered a nice day. The heat that had clung to the city for the better part of the week had broken, leaving behind a crystal-blue sky and a breeze that would have been refreshing if it didn't carry upon it the stench of death.

From his vantage point on the roof, Lou could see the west side of the city, its tall buildings thrusting up into the sky. There were less of them now. To Lou, the city was a great dying beast, and it wasn't dying quietly. Fires raged unchecked through the metropolitan area. Its handful of skyscrapers had turned into towering infernos, giant sticks of incense that couldn't cover up the smell of the city's demise. The dead roamed the streets like maggots crawling over the city's rotting flesh.

Portland, Oregon, once a hipster haven, the progressive jewel of the Northwest, was now nothing but a collection of buildings on the precipice of becoming a ruin. Like Pompeii or Easter Island, Portland was starting its descent into history, cracking and crumbling; the dust and ash of millennia would cover the city. Its buildings would collapse as fires, wind, and the carving knife of time sent the once immovable structures tumbling to their final resting place.

Lou wondered how long it would be until the city was found again. He doubted it would be during his lifetime. The situation had progressed too far. Would archeologists rediscover the city in a hundred years? Two hundred? Would the city go unchecked for a thousand years, until some random person stumbled across the "ancient" civilization. What records were they going to leave behind? The internet was gone, satellites orbits were quickly decaying, and no one knew how to run a press anymore. It was entirely conceivable that their entire civilization could disappear, but for the books they had printed. In that case, he guessed all that would be left would be Stephen King stories and Tom Clancy books.

But, that was the future. The city wasn't entirely gone yet. There were still those that remembered what Portland was like. They buzzed among the buildings like flies, travelling in circles, looking for places to feed, places to rest for a spell and catch their breath. But they were dying. Soon, there would be no one left to remember what the city was like before the dead had refused to stay that way. Humanity was on a collision course to extinction. It had been a little over a week.

Lou's thoughts ran dark. It was only natural, despite the sunshine, despite the breeze. Nothing was right. The breeze carried with it the smell of the dead. The sun turned the rotting corpse next to him into a ticking time bomb of disease, the abdomen swelling with bacteria and gas as the body's cells broke and nature took over. Clouds of haze from burning buildings marred the view as the smoke drifted over the valley.

The buzzing drew him to the edge of the roof. Thirty feet below him, they milled about, the former residents of the city, clawing at the side of the building as if they could scale the walls.

Lou watched them rake at the stone walls, and in his mind, a scale began to tip. It was a long way down, but he knew that it would be a quick fall. It would be two, maybe three seconds, and then it would all be over. The hopelessness had set in quick after he had taken care of Zeke. Fuck that. After he had killed Zeke. Might as well call it what it was. What hope did he have of making it if Zeke, a trained soldier, hadn't even managed to survive for a week?

The two had been through a lot together. An escape from jail, a flight through the city with a thousand shambling corpses on their trail, a ride down the Willamette, and finally, their flight from the Memorial Coliseum as it plunged into madness, the dead surging through its busted defenses and reducing the whole building into a massive mausoleum. Hundreds, if not thousands, of people had died in the fall of the Coliseum. Of that number, whatever it might be, there was an abundance of people who were more fit for survival than him. Yet, they were all trapped in that giant tomb, where once basketball players had run up and down the court to the adoration of thousands of fans, and he was here, sitting on a roof next to a corpse.

Lou looked up at the sun, the brightness of the glowing orb causing the skin around his eyes to crinkle, rays of sunshine warping into sword-like spikes around the edges. He laughed, an unexpected noise that came out of him unbidden, a short guffaw that said, "Well, look at me now." The more things changed, the more they stayed the same. He was still fighting for his life, just like when he was a kid on the streets. He had grown up without a mother, and his father's only interests seemed to be making money and getting high. He had always been on his own. He had always been surviving, and yet, today he was tired of it. Surviving for what?

Lou looked down at the corpse at his feet. Zeke, finally still. His body had sat on the floor of the theater for a day, the entire group in shock at the demise of their presumed leader. Lou had carried the head up first and set it down on the hot roof with the sort of reverence that the man deserved. Zeke had bound the individuals in their group together with his plans, with his confidence. He had given them purpose and direction. Now, they were all just sulking loners waiting for the inevitable, waiting for death to come knocking at the door... but death didn't knock. When it was your time, it just kicked the fucker down. He had seen that with his own eyes.

Once he had moved the head to the roof, Zeke's body had come second. He had thrown the stinking mass over his shoulder and climbed carefully up the ladder that led to the roof, rung by rung, pausing every so often to catch his breath and readjust Zeke's body on his shoulder. He had not been a small man, that was for sure.

They had all said their goodbyes earlier, those that had known him the longest, and even those that hadn't known him very long at all. The words had all been positive, nice things, the type of things that a cynic might call platitudes. But in the end, the group had all agreed that his body had to go. No one wanted it in the theater. It was too similar to the creatures that were banging on the walls and doors. No one wanted to see the dead anymore. They wanted to huddle inside, bury their heads in the sand, and hope that it all just sort of went away.

Lou looked down at the ground again. There was only one way it was all just going to go away... a two to three second fall ought to do it. In the distance, a skyscraper that had been burning steadily for the last day  finally crumbled to the ground. Lou felt the ground quake underneath his feet, and a cloud of debris, dust and smoke sprung up into the sky... yet it still burned, even the ruins still burned. Good, he thought. Let it burn. Let it all burn.

Lou bent down and grabbed Zeke's body, throwing it over his shoulder and balancing it on the edge of the waist-high wall that ran around the perimeter of the movie theater's roof. "Sorry, buddy." He pushed the body over the edge, and watched it tumble to the ground. It fell quick, quicker than Lou had expected. A little less than two-seconds and it was on the ground. The swollen stomach of Zeke's body had burst open, spilling its decaying and putrefied contents on the cement sidewalk that surrounded the theater.

Without thinking about it, Lou turned around and grabbed Zeke's head off the ground. The flesh was cold and made his stomach turn. It felt as if he were lifting a thing made of wet clay. He threw it over the side, and then wiped his hands on his jeans. It didn't matter. It's not as if his jeans could get any dirtier.

Lou regarded the Portland skyline one last time. Flames had started climbing one of the still remaining skyscrapers next to the one that had collapsed. He climbed down the ladder, into the darkness of the movie theater thinking, Let it burn. Let it all burn.

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THE

ENEMIES OF OUR

ANCESTORS

By

The Vocabulariast

Here is a sneak preview:

THE ENEMIES OF OUR ANCESTORS

Prologue: The Night Whispers

Kochen walked through the night, his bare feet testing for sharp rocks before he put his full weight on the ground. In this way, he moved through the black-chilled air. Wind blew through his obsidian hair, and his dusky brown skin raised gooseflesh in response. Kochen looked up and saw the outline of the canyon's rim against the night sky, the faint hint of blackness against a dark blue. More stars than he could count looked down at him. It was the time of the Lynx moon, the time of the bobcat. Its full, round face rose into the sky, bringing with it the onset of spring. He could smell the change in the air. Though he was only six-winters-old, in a world where seasons meant everything, he had learned the signs of change at a young age.

He walked through the empty farmland, away from the mud and stone houses that his ancestors had carved and molded into the cliff, his toes sinking into the loose brown soil. Kochen lived on the lowest terrace of the village nestled among the cliffs, so he needed no torch to descend down the variety of stone ladders that led from the highest level to the rough stone ground. He had simply walked out of his family's small room where his mother and father slumbered, inched down a single, thirty-rung ladder, and he was on the ground.

The farm soil had already been broken up for the spring. The soil felt cool and soft against his toes as he plodded through the loose farmland, avoiding the budding shoots of corn. He stopped to relieve himself, pulling his loincloth to the side. His urine steamed in the night as it pattered to the ground, impossibly loud.

Behind him, he heard someone doing the same. He turned to look and saw his father.

"What are you doing out here?"

"No, what are you doing out here?" his father shot back.

Kochen had been told over and over to not wander far from their house to relieve himself in the night. No one had ever explained why; they just said not to.

"I had to go. Besides, it's good for the crops." Kochen finished up his work and let his loincloth fall back into place. His father did the same. Kochen walked in his direction, and his father cuffed him on the back of the head.

"That is for thinking you know it all. Get your skinny rear-end back into the house."

Kochen ran in the night, lest his father's ire turn into more than just a simple cuff. He was usually slow to anger, but tonight he seemed different.

"Next time, you go from the ledge like everyone else."

Kochen heard the words, but dared not give a response on the odd chance that it would be seen as disrespectful. As Kochen put his first, rough hand on the ladder, he heard a noise, a low rumbling. It was not a noise he had ever heard before. It echoed through the canyon and across the farmland. A gust of wind blew the hair on his head backwards as he turned around to see what was making the noise.

In the faint light of the moon, he could see the blue shine of his father's skin running towards him. The tilled farmland was darker in the night than the untilled earth of the canyon floor, and when his father reached the edge of it, the earth opened up. A shape emerged, maggot-white, and twice as tall as his father. At first it seemed like a massive white worm, erupting from the ground, but then he noticed the arms Twisted and corded with segmented veins, the creature's arms were all twisted muscle and bone. In place of hands, the shape had sharp spikes, hooked like the backwards limbs of a praying mantis, and its eyes were black bulbs in a misshapen skull that was covered in skin the color of fresh-washed mushrooms..

Before he could even scream a warning to his father, the creature had shoved a claw through his father's middle, the other claw wrapping around his throat. Kochen's sob caught in his own throat, as his father descended into the ground in the embrace of the creature. The soil parted for him, and it was as if he had sunk into the river instead of the farmland of the village.

Kochen climbed the ladder, and reached the edge of the limestone landing. He sat on the edge, his feet safely on stone, watching and waiting for his father's hand to appear from the ground. It was a good harvest that year.

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The Abbey

By Jacy Morris

Here is a sneak preview:

THE ABBEY

Prologue

He would make him scream. So far they had all screamed, their unused voices quaking and cracking with pain that was made even worse by the fact that they were breaking their vows to their Lord, their sole reason for existence. Shattering their vows was their last act on earth, and then they were gone. Now there was only one left. A lone monk had taken flight into the abbey's lower regions, a labyrinthine winding of corridors and catacombs lined with the boxed up remains of the dead and their trinkets.

Brenley Denman's boots clanked off of the rough-hewn, blue stone as he trounced through the abbey's crypts, following the whiff of smoke from the monk's torch and the echo of his harried footsteps. His men were spread out through the underworks, funneling the monk ahead of them, driving him the way hounds drove a fox. The monk would lead them to his den, and then the prize would be theirs. And then the world.

He held his torch up high, watching the flames glimmer off of golden urns and silver swords, ancient relics of a nobility that had long since gone extinct, their glory only known by faded etchings in marble sarcophagi, the remaining glint of their once-prized possessions, and the spiders who built their webs in the darkness. Once they were done with the monk, they would take anything that glittered, but first they needed the talisman, the fabled bauble that resided at the bottom of the mountain the abbey was built on.

Throughout the land, legends of the talisman had been told for decades around hearthfires and inns throughout the isles. Then the tellers had begun to vanish, until the talisman of Inchorgrath and its stories had all but been forgotten. But Denman knew. He remembered the stories his father had told him while they sat around the fire of their stone house, built less than ten yards from the cemetery. His father's knuckles were cracked and dried from hours in the elements digging graves and rifling pockets when no one was looking. He knew secrets when he saw them. His father had first heard the story from the old Celts, the remains of the land's indigenous population, reduced to poverty and begging in the streets. His father said the old Celts' stories were two-thirds bullshit and one-third truth. They told of a relic, a key to the Celts' uprising and reclamation of the land, buried in the deepest part of the tallest mountain on the Isles. Of course, they spoke of regeneration and the return of Gods among men as well, but the relic... that was the important part. That was the part that was worth money. And now, he was here, with his men, ready to make his fortune.

He heard shouts, but it was impossible to tell where they were coming from. Sound echoed and bounced off of the blue, quartzite stone blocks, warping reality. He chose the corridor to his right, quickening his pace, his long legs eating up the distance. His men knew not to start without him, but you never knew when a monk would lash out, going against their discipline and training and earning a sword through the throat for their duplicity. That would be unacceptable to Denman. The monk must scream before he died.

His breathing quickened along with his pace, and he could feel the warmth of anticipation spread through his limbs as his breath puffed into the cold crypt air. Miles... they had come miles through these crypts, twisting and turning, burrowing into the secret heart of the earth, chasing the last monk who skittered through the hallways like a spider. The other monks had all known the secret of the abbey, the power it harbored, the relic it hid in its bowels. To a man, they had sat on their knees, their robes collecting condensation in the green grass of the morning, refusing to divulge the abbey's mysteries.

They had died, twisted, mangled and beaten. But still, all he could pull from them were the screams, musical expulsions of the throat that he ended with a smile as he dragged the razor-fine edge of his knife across their throats. Their blood had bubbled out, vivid against the morning sun, to splash on the grass.

When there was only one left, they had let him go. The youngest monk in the abbey, grown to manhood, but still soft about the face, his intelligent eyes filled with horror, stood and ran, his robe stained with the pooled blood of the monks that had died to his left and right. He was like one of the homing pigeons they used in the lowlands, leading them to home... to the relic. They had chased him, hooting and hollering the whole way, their voices and taunts driving the monk before them like a fox.  The chase would end at his burrow; it always did.

Ahead, he heard laughing, and with that Denman knew that the chase was at an end. He rounded one last corner to see the monk being worked over by his men, savage pieces of stupidity who were good for two things, lifting heavy objects and killing people. Denman waved his hand and they let the suffering monk go. The monk sagged to the ground, his head bent over, his eyes leaking tears. He sobbed in silence.

Denman stood in the secret of the crypt, a room at the heart of the mountain, the place where legends hid. How deep had they gone? At first there had been stairs, but then they had reached a deeper part of the crypt where the corridors twisted and turned, the floor pitched ever downward. Time and distance had lost all meaning in the breast of the world. How long had it taken them to carve this place, the monks working in silence to protect their treasure? Hundreds of years? A thousand?

The room was simple and small, as the order's aesthetics demanded, filled by Denman and the nine men that he had brought to take the abbey's secrets. Wait, one was missing. He looked at his men, brutal pieces of humanity, covered in dirt, mud and blood. The boy wasn't there. Denman shrugged. He would find his way down eventually.

The walls of the room were blue-gray, stone blocks stacked one on top of the other without the benefit of mortar, the weight of the mountain providing the only glue that was needed. The only other features of the room were an alcove with two thick, tallow candles in cheap tin holders and an ancient oak table.

The smoke from his men's torches hung in the air, creating a stinging miasma that stung his eyes. Brenley Denman squatted next to the monk and used his weathered hand to raise the monk's head by his chin. He looked into the monk's eyes, and instead of the fear that he expected to see, there was something else.

"What is this? Defiance?" he asked, amused by the monk's bravado. Denman stood and kicked the monk in the mouth with his boot, a shit-covered piece of leather that was harder than his heart; teeth and blood decorated the stones.

"Where is it?" he asked the monk. There was no answer. Denman had expected none. Say what you will about the Lord's terrestrial servants, but they were loyal... which made everything more difficult... more exhilarating. Denman was a man that loved a challenge.

He handed his torch to one of his men, a broken-faced simpleton whose only gifts were strength and the ability to do what he was told. Denman knew that he would need both hands to make the monk sing his secrets.

"Hand me the Tearmaker," he said to another of his men. Radan, built like a rat with stubby arms and powerful legs, reached to his belt and produced a knife, skinny and flexible, designed not so much for murder as it was for removing savory meat from skin and fat. It made excellent work of fish, and it would most likely prove delightfully deft at making a tight-lipped monk break his vows.

As he reached out to take the proffered knife from his man, the monk scrambled to his feet and dove for the alcove. Before they could stop him, the monk grasped both of the candle sticks and yanked on them. The candlesticks rose into the air. Rusted, metal chains were affixed to their bases, and they clanked against the surrounding stone of the alcove as the monk pulled on them.

The distant sound of stones grinding upon stones reverberated throughout the crypt. Somewhere, something was moving. Denman glared at the monk. The robed figure dropped the candlesticks and turned to face them. With his head cast downward, he reached into the folds of his robe and produced a rosary. He folded his  hands and began to pray, beads moving through his fingers, his lips moving without making sound.

The crypt shook as an unseen weight clattered through the halls of the crypt. Dust fell from the ceiling, hanging in the air, buoyed upwards by the tumbling smoke of their torches.

"What have you done?" Denman asked.

The monk did not respond. Instead, he reached into the hanging sleeve of one of his robes and produced a small stone thimble, roughly-made and ancient. It was shiny and black, the type of black that seemed to steal the light from the room. The monk put it up to his mouth, hesitated for a second and then swallowed it, grimacing in pain as the object slid down his throat.

In the hallway behind them, the grinding had stopped. The crypt was silent, but for the guttering of the torches and their own breathing. "Go see what happened," he said to the oaf and the rat. The other men followed them, leaving Denman alone with the monk and his unceasing, silent supplications to the Lord above.

Denman forced the monk onto the oak table. He offered little resistance. With Tearmaker in his hand, Denman began to carve the skin lovingly off of the monk's fingers. First, he carved a circle around the man's fingers, then a line. With the edge of his knife, he prodded a corner of the skin up, and then, grasping tightly, he ripped the skin away from the muscle and bone, dropping the wet flesh onto the ground. He did this to each finger, one by one. Sweat stood out on Denman's brow, and the monk had yet to scream. He hadn't so much as gasped or hissed in pain. He was turning out to be more work than he was worth. Except for the blood pulsing from his skinned fingers, he appeared to be asleep, his eyes softly closed.

"Where is it, you bastard?" There was no response but for the bleeding.

Denman pulled the monk's robe up around his waist. It was a quick jump, but he was eager to be done with the man on the table. Usually, he would take his time with a challenge like the monk, savoring the sensation of skin ripping from muscle and bone, but he could feel the weight of the mountain about him, its walls shrinking with every minute. Sweat covered his body, and the monk's calm demeanor was unnerving.

Radan rounded the corner at a run, his body dripping with sweat and panic on his face. He skidded to a stop, his boots grinding dust into the blue stones. "We're sealed in here," he said.

Denman looked at the monk lying on the table. His hand gripped Tearmaker tight. "What have you done?" The monk lay there, his eyes closed, a look of peace on his face. "What have you done!" he screamed, jabbing the knife into the monk's ribs. Then Denman saw the monk's hands. Where before his index and pointer finger had been reduced to skinless chunks of muscle and bone dripping blood on the table, there was now skin. "Impossible," Denman whispered.

The monk's eyes snapped open, and finally, Denman got the scream that he had been waiting for.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jacy Morris is a Native American author who has been writing and teaching in Portland, Oregon for years. After working on his own website Moviecynics.com for a decade, under the name The Vocabulariast, he decided to move on from critiquing others' works of art and start creating his own. He has written several books over the last few years including Unmade: A Neo-Nihilist Vampire Tale, This Rotten World, The Abbey, and The Enemies of Our Ancestors. In addition to novels, The Vocabulariast is known to write screenplays and make movies. His first movie, All Hell Breaks Loose has been released onto DVD by Wild Eye Releasing, and he is currently at work on his second film The Cemetery People.

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