ZOMBIE SUMMER!!!

Every Vote Counts
-by Lydia Ondrusek www.thelittlefluffycat.com

The good news was, it was the biggest turnout Annie could remember, in all her years as a poll worker. The bad news was, it was the biggest turnout Annie could remember, in all her years as a poll worker. The gym was full. Now that they’d had to cover the remains of the windows, and barricade the doors, it was dark and hot. November might be true cool fall some places, but not Texas.

The electricity had gone a few hours before – that had been how it started. There was a boom from somewhere and the lights went out. Nobody’d thought much of it. A car running into a transformer, someone had said. Annie had laughed with Marti Dodge, saying, “You’re escaping!” and hugging her before the mother of twins ran out to pick up her boys from the neighbor she’d traded Election Day sitting with.

Marti’s response, “I’m just going from the frying pan into the fire!” had turned out to be prophetic. Annie wondered where Marti was now. If she’d gotten the kids. If she’d gotten home.





It was soon after she left when the rocks – chunks of sidewalk, really – had begun to crash through the high windows. Cell phones had come out, and calls had been made. That was when they found out what was happening. At least as much as anybody knew.

The exposed lost their hearing first, apparently, and went into something like a steroid rage. Then . . . Someone’s overpriced smartphone had yielded pictures of cities in flames, horrors that the people trapped there in the gym passed between themselves much like the contagion, or contamination, or whatever it was, causing it. There’d been crying – then shrieks as the remaining broadcasters, afraid of bigger things than the FCC, began to describe, and to show, the true carnage. What the things wanted. What they did. Then, for a long time, there was silence.

And now, there was a plan. As many of them as could make it were going en masse to the parking lot, to get in whatever cars might still be intact – none of them knew how many – and try to get home. It was a pitiful plan, but it was all they could do. More to the point, it was all any of them wanted to do.

They’d done their part, they’d cast their votes. Red or blue, Republican or Democrat, it didn’t matter any more -- they’d all proved they were in possession of the one thing this manifestation of evil seemed to crave. Amazing that no matter where this new scourge had come from, no matter what its first round of victims wound up being called in the end (if there was anyone left to call them anything), they still wanted the same thing they always had in legend.

She was going to keep them from it the best way she knew how. Annie might be seventy-three years old, but she had a permit to carry concealed, she’d by gum brought her pistol with her, and she was going to lead the way to the cars.

She checked the cartridge in the automatic, popped it back home, thumbed off the safety. Don’t forget to count heads, she reminded herself. 8 votes for them.

One for you.

IN ADDITION TO

DARK SKY MAGAZINE ASKED ME SOME THINGS IT WAS ETHEL ROHAN'S FAULT

I HAVE BEEN LOOKING AT FACE SIZES NOT NECESSARILY HEAD SIZES. IF THE SIZE OF YOUR OVERALL FACE IS VERY TINY AND PULLED TOGETHER IN THE MIDDLE LIKE THE LAST SECONDS OF A TOILET BOWL FLUSH I WILL STARE AT YOUR FUCKING FACE LIKE IT IS A ONE OF THE PYRAMIDS OR THAT STONE ARCH IN UTAH OR THE MOUNTAIN WITH THE PRESIDENTS' FACES CARVED INTO IT. I WILL LOOK THE FUCK OUT OF YOUR FACE UNTIL I AM SATISFIED. I THINK IF YOUR FACE IS LIKE THIS, A CIRCLE WITHIN A LARGER CIRCLE, I THINK IT MEANS YOU ARE ODD LOOKING. IT DOES NOT MEAN I WOULDN’T FUCK YOU. MY FACE IS ODD SHAPED TOO. SOMETIMES IT LOOKS LIKE A TREE BREAKING AGAINST A STRONG WIND.

I HAVE BEEN EATING ANTS AND NOBODY CARES BECAUSE I THINK THEY DON’T KNOW. BUT MAYBE THEY DO. MAYBE THEY HAVE SEEN ME. I KILL THEM FIRST WITH MY FINGERS AND THEN I LICK MY FINGERS. SOMETIMES THE ANTS OR PARTS OF THE ANTS ARE ON MY FINGERS WHEN I LICK THEM WHICH MEANS I AM EATING THEM. THE ANTS ARE FROM COMPTON. THEY ARE VERY VERY VERY SMALL. THEY ARE SMALLER THAN REGULAR ANTS. REGULAR ANTS ARE THE KIND FROM YOUR CHILDHOOD. THE KIND THAT EAT THE REST OF YOUR JOLLY RANCHER STICK THAT YOU LEFT ON A BENCH. THE FLAT ONE IN THE PEEL BACK PLASTIC. THE ONE WHERE YOU’D SUCK IT SHARP AND THREATEN TO STAB YOUR BROTHER WITH IT. THOSE ANTS I WOULD NOT EAT. I DON’T EVEN WANT TO EAT THESE COMPTON ANTS, BUT BY GEORGE, THAT’S NOT WHAT’S HAPPENING.

THERE IS A BEE STUCK IN YOUR HAIR AND I’M NOT GOING TO TELL YOU ABOUT IT. I’LL JUST WATCH IT CRAWL AROUND A WHILE WHILE YOU READ YOUR BOOK THAT I THINK IS DUMB. WHEN I FEEL LIKE IT I’LL REACH OVER AND SMACK IT AWAY WITH MY FINGERS PRESSED AGAINST THEMSELVES LIKE AN ENVELOPE OR A WOODEN PLANK MADE OF FLESH. BALSA WOOD. SO EASY TO BREAK. VERY THIN. JUST RELIABLE ENOUGH. I WOULDN’T HURT YOU. .YOU’D TURN AND I’D SAY, OH, SORRY, I WAS JUST SHUSHING THE BEE. IT TRIED TO MAKE YOU SCARED I’D SAY. I’D SAY, THE BEE FLEW AWAY AND YOU ARE SAFE. I CAN SEE THE OCEAN. I CAN SEE SO FAR. ALL THE WAY TO THE WALL WHERE THE BLUE IS PAINTED. YOU’D SCOOT YOUR CHAIR AND GO BACK TO YOUR BOOK AND I’D WAIT FOR ANOTHER BEE.

ZOMBIE SUMMER!

By RC Miller

ZOMBIE SUMMER!!!

By erik norse

the best thing about a zombie is…

…it doesn’t blink

even
when one pulls off a foot
or spins it’s head around
or melts it’s fingers with a torch
knowing damn well

it’s meat grinder bound

…it doesn’t blink

even
when one drives a steak
thru it’s liver
will it twinge or quiver
nails in its eyes
spikes in its skull
an ear full of pipe
rebar or
something quite dull

…it still doesn’t blink

even
then
when totally dismembered
reassembled out of sorts
melon ball scoops used
to remove imaginary warts
anatomically disconfigured
with a few additional ports

…it won’t ever blink

ZOMBIE SUMMER!!!

Alive On Dies Irae
By Tyler Cobb


With senses whirling I took in the landscape
and was absorbed with the demolition
while she kicked puddles and said:


"Let's make these bastards bleed.
Some of the dead will hang like threads
so I need you to be better than their army."


The car sped toward us
with fresh cartridges and rugged old troops.
She was enthusiastic about making it to Rome,
wanted to keep going as far as possible and liberate Vietnam.


then she deployed us into the wind......
the intense anger.....chewing on this hate....
Expectations are high this month of June.


I looked around at the field before us and greeted the creatures.


As they hobbled into view I thought of Portugal
and the beginning of emergency and a military obsession;
all forced to become bestial,
to buy their breath through our random burning,
unable to focus on our clear-cutting
because the condemned flowed through the land, they did not see


that we were moving to Madeira Island
and did not expect to return, I
received true training on the island,
learned the perfect spot to bash them
so that skin splattered like a tossed pumpkin.


Nine years later and I am reliving that training
and preparing to bash these sick creatures one more time.
"Ration your bullets!"
"Slash them all down!"
"Set up a barricade on the left side!"


I was beginning to think that garotte wire
was our best option,
I grabbed some from the supply dozer
and instructed some grunts
to do the same and we
got down to business;
an end to these graveyard moaners, in


the sick dead I am flowing joy,
inside this moment
these worldwide lies and hurt
are cut up as I
shred lines of screaming human vomit,
shred flesh pestilence;
a few more minutes of prying
intestines out of this rancid sea of beasts
leads to the satisfying feeling of necessary endings
as decapitations are repeated on this
Dies Irae.


More cars sped toward us
with fresh cartridges and rugged old troops.
She was high strung and burning with a carnal hope
that this adrenaline would carry us all to Rome.


I broke
down the left with a bloody machete
to hack one of them off a comrade, seeing the
eyes of the voyeurs fixed upon us.


I knew
that the eyes were familiar and
more savages were soon to be revealed,
so I crossed the field to hail her jeep,
it was time for safety, her face seemed to
say that Rome was quickly becoming a pipe dream.


More cars sped toward us
with fresh cartridges and rugged old troops.
She has them turn around
and fall back into the
green and silent trees,
wary of those calm figures in the hills,
bathed in mist, what I knew is that
they were men who would thrive in this madness,


wise monsters,
hatched from pain,
nature's fresh demons
let loose into the shadows,


I had done
everything I possibly could to remain human;


I had acted like becoming
a super soldier was my calling and
gotten transferred to the small outpost in Arona
only to poison the captain's coffee so I could escape,


slipping away in a lifeboat
with stashed supplies,
as the sun would eventually lead me to a new home.


Through the heat I found a tribe of good people,
bunched on the Northern coast
to avoid
the destruction happening all around them
and slowly
I helped nurture a line of bold soldiers,


I rattled
forward with warfare
and unraveled all of the plagued land,
I rattled


through battles with a medieval scorn
and sent a message to this hell, that we
would not be persuaded
to escape into fear
and if these rancid inhuman foes
could not see what they had become
we would treat them like a disease
and I would move like a raw antibody.


The real problem had become the mutations
of this disease;
of which I had narrowly avoided becoming,


those with a belief in biological power,
control
is their decided goal,


it is what justifies their massive hairy fists
that reclaimed Portugal
but became trapped in their implanted genetic distortion,


and so that control is always out of reach,
I know why they are here, they need me to die;
I am the cold reminder


that mankind can be pure.
By being alive, I proved that their derangement was truth,
so our elimination became the only way they could control.


The menace of this mutated army
was just like that of a stubborn disease;


beaten back by our gunfire
they burst into angry pockets.


We needed more time to create our opportunity,
through some misdirection, we found exactly that.
As the mutant soldiers gained ground, they pressed us back
toward the original battlefield and some of the dead had risen again.
That was the problem if you didn't decapitate them;
they would lay there quivering for about an hour, then get back up.


I had found that this was a decent window of time to do many things.
In this case, replace some of their organs with powerful explosives.


If the world was going to keep taking everything in sight
with it's own brand of lunatic looting,
the least I could do was cause some things to disappear myself.
The bombs lit up like sunshine,


groups of the imperfect bastards
were swallowed up in the rapture of decay.


At that moment, I
felt like a holy man,
felt ready for Rome.

Why Was Six Afraid of Seven?

Tres Crow did an interview with me HERE.

Because Seven Ate Nine

The sun stoked the fire in the air and we all sat around breathing it. David Bowie tongue-kissed the silence. I pictured his mouth opened wide, all tonsil and tongue.


She asked, “Is he saying, ‘fame’?” and I said, “Yes.”


He said, “You look like a completely different person with your fingernails painted.”


I wondered about that, waved my hands around my face, asked, “What about now?”


He said, “Yes.”


I did it again. “Now?”


“Yes.”


She said, “I agree. Completely different person.”


I thought about it some more. I held my arms out. Wrists bent. Hands pressed against the air. Ten red ovals.


I wanted to say, “But I ate a fried egg this morning,” “But I wiped enough times until the brown was gone,” “But I put on mascara and thought about how today I probably would feel less happy than the day before.” I wanted to say, “Look at my dry elbows.”

But I didn’t.

I sat there in my skin while they looked at me. So new. Now blonde and well-kempt. Now speaking French. Now petting Great Danes.

They just nodded.

ZOMBIE SUMMER !!!!!

The Story of Chesty
By Brian Long

There is a library in my hometown that sits on top of a hill that gives you this postcard perfect view of everything. I have been coming to this library on this date for the past ten years with my twin sister. I come here to support her, but she comes here to give her respects to her friend Chesty.

“You don’t have to keep coming here, Ron,” she tells me every year.

I want to tell her that she doesn’t either, but I know she’ll keep coming anyway. I never understood my sister’s sympathy for the living dead; but maybe that’s why I keep coming back here year after year. I want to understand.

Beatrice and I were only a few months old when the first Our survival during what is referred to as “The Dead Months” by the more bombastic media outlets was thanks entirely to my mother, Shelia. She was the heir to the Makowski Family Funeral Home dynasty. As a child, she would assist her grandfather and father with the embalming process. She eventually became better at putting lipstick on a corpse than her own face. If my mother’s upbringing had taught her one thing, it was that the dead belonged in the ground and she felt more than obligated to chauffer them back to their eternal resting place six feet deep. Her unshakable bravery when it came to dead bodies made dealing with the initial shock of cadavers roaming the Earth easier to handle and a gun enthusiast grandfather had helped to make her in to the next Annie Oakley.

It was this special blend of qualities that convinced the people of Washington to appoint my mother the sheriff of our small town. I say sheriff because there was an Old West sense of freedom and lawlessness to the world after the majority of the zombies had been put back to their eternal rest. The fear that the dead would no longer stay dead for very long gave people an excuse to disregard the law; this meant lootings and general chaos in the streets were a daily occurrence. My mother would stroll through the town exuding this air authority that tended to stop any trouble before it began. She would keep her shotgun with the photo of my sister, my father, and I taped to the butt, close to her chest at all times. My father, Callum, was tragically turned into a part of the flesh eating masses shortly after my mother gave birth, which forced her to put him down herself. I think that’s part of the reason my mother took on the responsibility of the town sheriff; she didn’t want any other families to have to kill their own.

That was the tricky part, the people who died didn’t immediately turn into flesh-devouring monsters, which meant the unpleasant tasking of putting down any of the newly dead in town was left on the shoulders of my mother and a few of her trusted deputies. It was never an exact science as to when it would happen, but it never seemed to take longer than two months. Obviously, if a person had been bitten they would become a zombie in only a few short hours; however, if they died of something like natural causes it could take the entire two week deadline before they were awake and hungry again. Needless to say, two months is a lot of time for bodies to begin piling up, so putting these reanimated people out of their misery was never a done-in-one type of job. I still remember accompanying my mother to work on these days; “house cleaning” she used to call it. Two people would cover a coffin; one would be in charge of opening the coffin, while the other would handle the shooting. The first time I witnessed this act was with my mother and Deputy Lerner. It was Lerner’s first graveyard sweep with my mother and you could tell he was nervous as hell. He unlocked the coffin with a jittery hand and flung the coffin open and jumped back with a start as the person inside snarled at the first sign of light. He bit at the metal bars that all new coffins built had been required by law to include. I remember my mother’s chuckle at her partner’s expense as she pulled the trigger. In an instant, the space between the zombie’s two eyes was completely caved in as though a railroad spike had flown through it. The once white interior of the coffin was now splattered with a meaningless crimson pattern that entranced me with its strange blotches and streaks. Each pattern of zombie residue was like a grotesque Rorschach test.

BLAM

I see a pair of socks

BLAM

I see a humpback whale

BLAM

I see a cloud

My sister had never become as enthusiastic about violence towards the undead as I had.

“They were people once too,” she used to say “why don’t we try and fix them?”

My mother had gotten tired of having these discussions with my sister. Even at the age of ten, she expected us to have gained enough understanding of the rules between human and zombie kind by now. They would try and kill us so we would have to kill them first.



This answer was never enough to satisfy my sister’s wild cravings for answers to the world’s questions. She would walk through the remains of our town’s library and stuff her head with every page of the old encyclopedias that were left without care across the floors of the abandoned library. Not many kids our age understood my sister; the public education system hadn’t really been rebuilt yet, so no one understood her need to learn as much as she could about the world around her.

One afternoon, I joined her trek through the carcass of our town’s literary center. Somewhere between the Young Adult and Fantasy sections we heard the something that sounded like a sack of doorknobs being dragged across the grape colored carpet.

“Oh my gosh,” I heard Beatrice gasp. I traced her frozen finger toward the point it had focused on.

A pair of hands, rotted with gangrene, gripped the fibers of the carpet like a life line. The hands pulled behind them a pair of arms, a head, and half of a torso with intestines hanging from it like cans on a newlywed couple’s car.

The zombie pulled itself up using the bookshelves like a ladder and turned to face myself and my sister. He stared at us with his single, cloudy eye as a few small bugs crawled out of the hole that once housed his absent eyeball.

“I think we should go,” I said. Without my mother and her reliable 12-gauge around, I was truly terrified to be near a zombie.

“Wait,” my sister said. She took a few cautious steps towards the half of a human to test the waters. Slowly, she raised her hand and waved it back and forth in the most welcoming fashion she could muster.

The zombie lifted his decaying hand and waved back.

“Beatrice, are you crazy?! Mom is going to kill us!”

By now Beatrice was only a few inches away from the zombie’s face. The creature leaned forward and took a few sniffs of Beatrice’s arm then turned away in disgust.

“Ron, look,”

Beatrice pointed to the tattered remains of the corpse’s t-shirt; it read: “Meat is Murder.”

“I think we should name him Chesty,” she said.

We walked home at a slow pace so Chesty could keep up with us. I dreaded my mother’s reaction to us bringing one of the living dead into our home. Once my sister had an idea in her head, she stuck with it.

“It’ll be fine,” she said “he’s one of the nice ones.”

When we arrived home, Beatrice tried to teach Chesty a number of tricks like rolling over and fetching. He wasn’t very good at rolling over and it took him ten minutes for him to fetch a stick from one side of the backyard to the other, but Beatrice didn’t care. She taught him a slower version of patty cake and rock, paper, scissors even though he always threw paper; she still let him win every now and then.

I don’t think I ever saw Beatrice that happy before or after that day. For once, her curious nature and the ideas that seemed so crazy to my mother didn’t seem as crazy as she ran around our backyard with a zombie dragging himself behind her. I could make out on Chesty’s face what I could only imagine was the closest thing zombies could do to smiling.

“Beatrice,” my sister and I froze at the sound of our mother’s voice “you and your brother need to go inside. Now.”

My sister looked over at Chesty; for a moment I thought she would try to argue with her but she knew it was pointless. We walked side-by-side into the house. My sister sat next to the door and listened to the sound of our mother’s shotgun blast as it echoed through the house.

My sister never forgot about Chesty as she grew up. When we turned 18 our mother insisted that we accompany her on zombie hunts. Beatrice would always give the ones she spotted time to get away before my mother could get to them. It was her personal way of avenging Chesty’s death and giving a metaphorical “fuck you” to my mother.

The library has since been rebuilt but a few cracks remain here and there; scars that will never heal. Outside the library is a small garden where Beatrice created an impromptu tombstone out of a large rock for Chesty. On the rock is an epitaph painted in yellow and purple. It reads:

“Here lies Chesty. He was one of the nice ones.”

“Why do we still come here?” I asked her this past year.

She shrugged her shoulders.

“I like giving him the funeral he never got.”

She left a daisy next to the rock and lit a cigarette. I don’t think I’ll ever completely understand this ritual. Maybe she needs a reminder as to why she never speaks to our mom, maybe she likes remembering that day she didn’t feel crazy for thinking zombies weren’t the unnatural abominations that everyone else thought they were. I do know one reason that I come up here; to see that smile on my sister’s face again that I haven’t seen since that spring afternoon in our front yard. For a few brief seconds it will appear on her face again and I’ll feel a little bit closer to understanding why we leave a daisy on the grave of a zombie named Chesty.

ZOMBIE SUMMER !!!

Straight From the Screen
By Paul Mullin

Right after the infection took a mostly complete hold over the planet’s population, we made a comforting but surprising discovery: For once, real life was exactly like the movies.

If you’d seen and absorbed at least one zombie movie and weren’t unlucky enough to be in bed when your spouse turned, you were pretty much going to survive this thing. Only problem was, the percentage of people whom the virus didn’t turn – or just outright kill – was comparatively small.

Very near the beginning we learned where to draw the lines. Bits and pieces of each movie proved to be accurate, but no single film captured what we were now seeing in nature, if nature was really actually responsible for this.

Zombies can’t run. They can’t climb fences, they can’t climb stairs, they have a much harder time breaking glass than you would think and they can’t open doors. Their sole purpose is to transport a virus that is eating away at their brains. Anything involving more than the most basic motor function – moving – is out of the question for the infected.

They do bite people, or scratch them, or vomit or bleed or whatever, anything to move the virus from one host to the next, proliferating the strain and insuring its survival for at least another few days. Speaking of which, they can also be trapped and left to rot to death. I know this for a fact, because once I had locked my zombified mailman in my bathroom it only took him a week or two to die. A second time.

Armed with knowledge, survivors have been forming bands of zombie exterminators to expedite the process of wiping the virus off the face of the earth. I’m in one of those bands.



My girlfriend and my best friend are both cops. And after both of our families fell victim to the virus, Lia and I decided that we had to stick together. I think Pax ended up coming along because he didn’t want to be alone, although he would never admit to that.

The three of us decided we were going to do our part in exterminating our undead cohabitants, and when I say “the three of us,” you had better believe I mean “Lia and Pax.” Not only was I a terrible shot, but I couldn’t even bring myself to pull the trigger. I’m an airline pilot, for crying out loud. On no less than four occasions had I leveled the sights at a zombie’s forehead and then frozen. At this point the group knew my tendencies, and such situations usually ended with a begrudging Pax blowing the monster’s head off and then issuing me a disappointed glance or five.

“You gotta get over that someday, Spitz,” he’d tell me. “I know it’s more difficult for a civilian but damn, dude. They’ll kill you if you don’t get them first.”

We’d be on our quest for about a year, moving from place to place, staying with sheltered survivors at night and exterminating during the day. The infection had turned out the world’s first batch of zombies exactly one year, two months and four days ago – hard to forget a day like that. It turned everyone, or at least that’s the way it seemed at the time, until we learned that entire regions of the country had been spared in some cases, and in others an entire state went except two teenagers who were hiding out in the cafeteria of their high school. It was like someone dragged a sheet over the world, forgetting that they had poked a bunch of different sized holes in the linen.

One of those holes was reportedly centered on a small town in Iowa, and when reports claiming such reached the organizers of our little effort, we ended up being the closest group and they sent us to investigate.

We arrived on Thursday. I did my best to keep up with the passage of time even though hardly anyone else on this planet cared what day it was anymore. Our job was to scout each and every building in this town and bring anyone who was still alive out with us.

Our first stop was the elementary school. It was an odd contrast, seeing a place once conducive to learning and growth full of decaying man-eaters. It smelled terrible, but I’d learned better than to try and pinch my nose and breath through my mouth, because the virus’ stench was special – in an enclosed space it was like walking through a thick, palpable fog that would drift into your mouth if you left it open. And it tasted no better than it smelled. Worse, in fact.

We entered a first grade classroom in a single file line, Pax first, Lia second and me last, since these things didn’t really have any sneaky tendencies. I closed the door behind us, taking one last tentative look down the hallway in both directions.

“What time would it have been here, Marcus?” Lia said, her normally high-pitched voice a tone I had only heard once – when she told me her family was dead. I turned and saw her staring at a bulletin board on the wall opposite the windows, gun dangling uselessly from her trigger finger.

I looked at Pax, who shrugged at me and shook his head perplexedly.

“Well…” I thought about it for a second, finally using my knowledge of time zones for something that mattered. “I think it would have been around eleven in the morning. But there’s no guarantee it spread out here at the exact same time,” I said, holding up my hands in a vain attempt to wave off the sinking feeling I felt growing in my gut.

Lia reached up to the board and tore something down, holding it at waist level and studying it.

“It did,” she said softly. “It definitely did.”

She held out the paper toward me, and I walked over and grabbed it. I flipped it over and saw a picture drawn by one of the children – Zachary, the scrawled crayon said. It looked like a picture of his bus stop, bright yellow clunker in the foreground and a red-covered stick figure walking behind it.

While I was deciphering the drawing, Lia had moved across the room to the closet, where I supposed the children kept their coats and backpacks during the day. I dropped the paper and rushed over to her, eager to make sure her shock would not prevent her from protecting herself. It wouldn’t – she was poised at the closet door, hand on the doorknob and gun raised, pointed to where the opening would be.

She gently pulled the closet door open, and I jumped. She looked back over her shoulder at me, eyebrow raised.

“Just a body, hon.”

I peered around her to the inside of the closet and saw what I presumed was the body of a teacher or support staffer, bloody and with eyes the most startling gray color I had ever seen, like the eyes were filled with smoke. Lia kicked the legs to make sure it wasn’t a zombie. No movement. She hung her head and turned around to face Pax and I.

“I hate this place already,” she said quietly. I placed a hand on her shoulder to try and comfort her, and she looked at me and smiled weakly. “Let’s keep going, the sooner we get out of here the better.”

I nodded and turned to walk toward the door. Pax made a head motion that he was going into the hallway, then stepped outside to cover our exit. When I made it to the door I stopped and turned to make sure Lia was following. She wasn’t.

“Lia, come on,” I said. “We’re going to do this as fast as we can, okay?”

She looked up at me, and all I could see on her face was sadness. I started to walk back over to her, and before I could even react, the teacher/staffer was on its feet and had its teeth in her shoulder.

Lia screamed in pain and bashed the monster on the head with her weapon. It released, and she quickly turned around and emptied her entire magazine into its head. I felt my eyes widen past the point of comfort, and I yelled for Pax as loud as I could. By the time he came rushing in Lia had hit the floor, shoulder wound bubbling with dark, thick blood.

I rushed over to her and kneeled down by her side. I cradled her head in my hands like I’d seen so many actors do on screen, trying to staunch the flow of blood from her shoulder with the piece of my shirt. But she didn’t twitch or jerk around violently or cough dramatically. She was shivering, shaking quietly in my arms, eyes staring off somewhere behind me as her breathing became unsettlingly rapid and shallow.

“Hang in there, kiddo,” I said with a weak smile. I placed my hand on the side of her face and pushed gently, redirecting her gaze to my face.

Her eyes shuffled across my features for a moment, then locked on mine. I could see the panic, almost jumping out at me. I stroked her cheek with my thumb.

“Spitz.” Pax was behind me, arm outstretched to offer me the gun I had dropped when I ran to her. He bent down so that it was plainly in my periphery, glinting specks of light into my eyes and taunting me, baiting me into finally becoming a murderer.

I allowed my vision to leave Lia and focus on the weapon. Pax gave it a shake to get his point across.

“I can’t do it,” I said. I looked down quickly, then back up at Lia. “I can’t shoot her.”

“You have to, man,” Pax said softly. He bent further and placed the gun on the floor, then stood up straight. “Safety’s on, round’s in the chamber.” He put a hand on my shoulder. “I’m so sorry.”

I heard his boots clomp away, and I turned my head to watch him leave. He stopped at the doorway and turned around to look back.

“I’m so sorry.”

He closed the door behind him, and then I heard him draw back the slide of his own weapon, and the loud snap as it shot back forward, drawing a bullet into position.

I turned back to Lia. Her eyes were darting around the room, never focusing on one spot for more than a split second. I found myself constantly readjusting my hold of her, as if I could put my hands in just the right spot and fix this whole thing. I felt a great deal like the dangling bits of ceiling left over from a roof collapse – no matter how hard I strain to keep the rain from coming in, it drips past me and pools on the floor.

“I won’t do it,” I told her, trying to catch her attention again. “You deserve better.”

Suddenly, her eyes flashed back to me and the shivering stopped. I put two fingers up to the side of her neck to check for pulse, desperately hoping all it would take was a gentle shake to bring her back, to get her eyes moving again, but she was gone. I watched her eyes dim slowly, like there was a fire inside someone was neglecting, letting it burn to embers and then only smoke.

I placed her head gently on the ground and reached for the gun. It felt cold and evil in my hand, completely out of place. I stood up and looked back down at her. I’d never seen someone turn before. I know Pax had, but then again he’d seen pretty much everything this virus had to offer. Something in me burned with a disgusting curiosity, a feeling I tried to mask with the overwhelming hesitation I knew I would feel once she came back. Once I had to switch off the safety and pull the trigger.

“That’s not Lia anymore, Marcus.”

I turned and saw Pax standing in the half-opened doorway, hands wrapped around the stock of his weapon, finger steady over the trigger guard.

“I know she looks the same, but there won’t be anything left of your girl once she gets up again,” he said, shifting his weight in what looked like a nervous fashion. “You have to put an end to this, and then we have to help put an end to the whole thing. We have to keep going.”

I stared at him and tried to calm my heart rate. I knew he was right, but the sick feeling in my gut and the heaviness of the gun in my hand screamed out how wrong he was. How she was still my Lia.

I felt her leg twitch against mine, and my head jerked back to look down at her. I saw her head turn slightly and she let out a slight moan. I looked back at Pax, who now had his gun raised and pointed at Lia. He made eye contact with me only for a moment, and then positioned the sights of his weapon. She moaned again, louder, and less human, and I turned back to her. Her head lolled from side to side lazily, and then in an instant it shot up straight and turned toward me.

I no longer recognized the face I saw below me. I looked at the eyes for one last sign, some final vestige of the girl I loved. Nothing. Only smoke.

I heard the empty shell casing hit the floor before I even realized the gun had gone off.