Dead Things That Eat Me

Rick and Carl Grimes… pic from the Walking Dead Wiki

I – One Potato, Two

“What a stupid show!” Edge flipped the TV off and tossed the remote on the table in disgust. “I can’t believe you made me sit through another entire season of that crap!”

“No one screwed your ass to the couch,” Jim retorted. He picked up an ornate water bong from the table and torched a long gurgling bowl before offering the bong to his roommate.

Edge declined it. “You smoke that shit way too much,” he said. “Man, I can’t believe after all that crap, Rick and Carl are the one’s still alive. I would have shot that little fucker Carl halfway through season one! All he does is get everyone else killed. And if his dad bitched about it, I’d have capped his ass too.”

“It’s just a show, man.” Jim choked out an exhale. He got up and headed for the kitchen. “Just something to watch. Besides, every show has some annoying little pissant causing everyone grief. You know, Scooby-Doo has Shaggy… Congress has Ted Cruz… it’s like part of the magic formula or something.”

“Whatever. The whole zombie premise is so ridiculously stupid,” Edge complained. He got up to follow Jim into the kitchen. “How the fuck is something with no brain and no residual respiratory function supposed to kill you? It’s slow, it’s weak, and it only has one utterly predictable motive.” He stopped to stare at the ironic image of his blazed-out roommate, brainlessly guzzling milk from the jug with the refrigerator door standing open. “Or… maybe the playing field is more even than I thought,” he muttered.

Jim returned the milk to the open fridge where he continued to stare hungrily. “You know what we really need? …is some donuts, man. Couldn’t you go for a donut right now?” He swung the door shut and turned toward Edge almost triumphantly. “Dude! Let’s go get some donuts!”

Edge’s heart stopped cold in his chest. It all happened in slow motion, but there was nothing he could do to think or react. A man was standing behind the refrigerator door, or what was left of a man, anyway. Part of his face had fallen away and what remained looked gangrenous and rotten. When the refrigerator door shut, he fell upon Jim, knocking him to the floor, tearing savagely at his throat and shoulder with his teeth. Blood erupted everywhere from Jim’s neck. Edge slipped in the blood spray as he tried to back away. Flailing blindly as he fell, he sent a little garage-sale kitchen island crashing to the floor with him. Utensils, tools, flashlight, lots of rubber bands, a deck of cards, an unused phone book – all its contents scattered around the scene of his friend being devoured alive while he could only watch in horror.

It was too surreal for Edge to comprehend. His desperate hands, clutching at the floor to keep pulling him away, landed upon a hammer. He pulled it up and blinked at it in terrified confusion, and then without really thinking, he stood, walked over to the gluttonous carnage in progress and rained the hammer down on the man’s head several times. A rotting smell filled the kitchen, as brains and bits of deteriorating flesh joined Jim’s blood in one big mess of sanguine chaos. The commotion quieted to still silence, amplifying the one remaining sound of Edge vomiting uncontrollably to add to the disgusting scene.

Jim’s dead eyes stared up at him from the floor. He’d bled out in seconds and his blood was everywhere, spattered with bits of brain, hair, an eyeball, and other flesh that bore no discernible identifying properties. Hours of the Walking Dead episodes they’d watched together replayed themselves in Edge’s head. Jim might turn. Edge raised the hammer up again and then pounded it down furiously on Jim’s head, over and over and over, mutilating it to an unrecognizable pulp, as if in revenge; as if somehow this was all Jim’s fault for screwing his ass to the couch.

Edge collapsed in an emotional heap, tossing the hammer aside. As he sat there shaking, the house phone rang. And rang. And rang…

On the other end, Annie patted her phone anxiously as if it would somehow make someone answer sooner. She was crying. “Please pick up. Please pick up. Oh God, please pick up…”

“Hello?”

“Edge? Thank God! Is Stephen there yet?”

“No.”

“Edge, are you okay? You don’t sound good.”

“No. Yeah. No. I don’t know.”

“Oh my God, Edge, they’re everywhere! They’re all around my apartments. Did Stephen call you? He said he was heading over there with Dave.”

“No,” Edge retched again as autolytic putrefaction flatulated itself from the twice-dead intruder’s relaxing innards. He scrambled to his feet. “Who is this?” he gagged. “Annie? Let me call you back on my cell.”

“No, no, no, don’t hang…”

Safely in the other room, away from the smell, he returned her call.

“Edge?”

“Hey, sorry, I had to cut you off. What do you mean they’re everywhere? Who?”

“I don’t know. People. Creepy people. Mobs of them. They’re all wandering around trying to push in doors and windows and stuff. I heard some screams from downstairs… I’m really scared, Edge. Are you sure Stephen didn’t call? He’s not answering his phone.”

“I’m sure. Your door locked?”

“Um… I guess. I…”

“Keep it locked and don’t open it for anyone. I’m gonna come get you, okay?”

“Why, who are they? What’s going on?”

“I don’t know. I know it sounds crazy, but I think…” It did sound crazy. “I think they’re zombies.”

There was a long, long, silence as Annie digested the words. “What?” she finally asked.

“I know, right?”

“Zombies?”

“Yeah.”

“Like, Night of the Living Dead, come back to life and kill people zombies?”

“Whatever. Or like Walking Dead bite you and eat you and then you turn into one zombies. Hell if I know.”

Annie walked to a window on the other end of the phone and looked out. Night was beginning to fall. The creatures milling about were all hidden in shadow now. “That’s not funny, Edge. You know I don’t do dead things that eat me.”

“I wasn’t talking about one of your stories. And weren’t you the one going on one night about your vampire boyfriend?”

“Shut up! He was my pet. And it was just a dream.”

“Well, this ain’t no dream. They a…” The words were too unbelievable to speak. “One of them… ate… Jim.”

“What!” Annie shrieked. “No-huh-uh!”

“Well, just part of him. I bashed its head in before it could eat too much.”

Annie paused again. “How did it get in your house?” she asked suspiciously.

“I dunno, maybe Dumb-ass left the garage door open again.”

“Um… wouldn’t that mean it was still open?”

“Oh shit!” How did he get in? “I gotta go. Keep your door locked. I’ll get there as soon as I can.”

“Edge, don…”

His phone started buzzing again before he could even tuck it into his pocket, but he ignored it. Nothing he could tell Annie was going to make this any better.

II – Dead Things Come in Threes?

Edge was panic-stricken. He pulled his shirt up over his mouth and nose, made his way past the two lifeless bodies on the kitchen floor to where he had tossed the bloody hammer, and picked it up again. The blood on the handle was disgustingly sticky. He tried hard not to look at, or smell, what was left of his roommate of more than two years. He started down the hall toward the garage and stopped immediately. The door to the garage was closed, but the door to the hall closet was open.

Don’t be so stupid, he thought. Zombies can’t think. And they don’t hide in closets.

He stepped in front of the door and quickly back again just to be safe. A moment later, a woman in her mid-thirties staggered out of the closet. Her skin was blue, the irises of her eyes grey and lifeless. Edge blinked.

“Karen? Karen Richards?”

There was no reaction. She showed no visible signs of injury as she reached out at him. There were no tell-tale bite marks. There was no torn flesh. She smelled like she hadn’t showered in a year.

“Come on and get some, then,” Edge coaxed, brandishing the hammer.

He took a step back to gauge his blow only to find his shoe was untied and he was standing on the shoelaces. The hammer fell from his hand as he tripped and toppled backward, the woman – she really looked like Karen – falling after him.

Just don’t let her bite you.

His hand instinctively shot up to grab her throat. It was cold and clammy, and he could feel her dead flesh bruise easily in his grasp. She gnashed at him with impotent jaws as he held her foul breath just inches from his face. He found the hammer and squirmed his way toward where it had fallen. Fumbling with his left hand, he swung it awkwardly at her head until he could push her away, and then in a frenzy he mutilated her the way he’d mutilated Jim.

“Dude! You killed her!”

Edge turned to see Stephen and Dave standing over him, white as ghosts. He recoiled, raising his hammer in his defense, but they made no move toward him.

“How did you guys get in?” he asked nervously.

“Through the back door,” Stephen said. His voice was calm as if the spectacle didn’t bother him in the least. “It was wide open.”

“You just beat her brains in like she was the thirtieth bent nail,” Dave stammered in wonder.

“You didn’t see anyone out there?”

“No one,” Stephen answered.

“You killed her,” Dave wailed again.

“I didn’t kill shit, Dave. She was dead already.”

“What do you mean, dead?” Stephen asked.

“Dead. You know… dead. Post mortem. Corpse? Cadaver?”

“What would a corpse be doing in your hallway?”

“Oozing? How the hell do I know? She was hiding in the closet before. There’s another one in the kitchen. Two I guess, counting Jim. That one was dead a lot longer than she was I think.”

“You call 9-1-1?”

“And tell ’em what? I’m being attacked by zombies?” His phone buzzed in his pocket again. “Oh yeah, that’s probably your girlfriend, Steve. She’s freakin’ out, says they’re all over the place there. I told her I’d come get her.”

“What am I stupid? You’re trying to tell me this is really a zombie?”

“Was,” Edge corrected. “Technically, she’s not one anymore. I mean look at her.”

“You’ve lost it, man. There’s no such thing as zombies and we watched you bash her head in. I’m calling 9-1-1.” Stephen started into the kitchen. His gag reflex was audible when he found the two bodies there sprawled in decapitated capitulation.

Dave’s eyes widened.

Edge shrugged an I-told-you-so.

“Shit,” Dave said. “I need a weapon. You got a crowbar or something?”

“Yeah, but it’s out in the garage.”

Dave started down the hall.

“Don’t go out there you idiot!”

Dave wasn’t listening now. He opened the door and stepped out into the garage. “Hey, where’s the light switch?” he called. It was followed shortly by his screams.

Stephen raced back from the kitchen at the sound, and both men raced toward Dave’s screams. Stephen tried to push through the door into the garage while Edge frantically tried to slam it shut before he could.

“What are you doing?” they both yelled simultaneously.

“Dude, he’s a goner. Just shut the door,” Edge begged.

“What, are you insane?” Stephen cried. “He needs our help.” He wrenched the door open and pushed through.

The commotion was instantaneous. More screams from Stephen and then a hand pushing at the door now from the other side. Edge desperately tried to push the door closed but the arm pushed its way through the opening. He put his shoulder into it and slammed into the door as hard as he could. Rotting flesh cut through easily and after several more tries, the bone snapped through. The arm fell to the floor and the door latched shut.

Edge’s heart was pounding furiously. He collapsed against the door and slid down it, panting heavily from the adrenaline and the struggle. “You’ve lost it, man,” he mocked Stephen sarcastically. Guttural gnawing from the other side of the door was the only answer.

His phone buzzed in his pocket again, the third time since he hung up. Annie Calling. At least she was still alive. He really didn’t want to tell her Stephen was dead now so he let the phone buzz. He pushed himself up, and made his way to Jim’s bedroom. He checked the closet carefully before rummaging through it to find what he was looking for: an aluminum baseball bat Jim probably hadn’t swung since he’d first discovered pot. He spun it around in his hand and tapped it on the floor and then headed for the back door where Stephen had said they’d seen no one coming in.

Edge stepped cautiously down his back steps, bat half poised, his eyes darting nervously at every flicker of a shadow. The sun had settled nearly to the horizon. There wasn’t much daylight left. The beginnings of sunset seeped out onto the sky, the sun bleeding to death, its throat torn savagely by the creeping nightfall. The dusk was innocuously peaceful, lulling false security, every hushed sound screaming at his frazzled nerves as he made is way down the narrow alley to his front yard.

Whispered growls and clumsy rustling could be heard from inside as he crept by the side door to the garage, left ajar by the recently deceased pot head on the kitchen floor. Poetic injustice. He could make out the sounds of perhaps three bodies moving around, Stephen and Dave he imagined lying prostrate amid their own entrails. Or are they two of the three? He shuddered. He reached out and pulled the door shut as quietly as he could, locking them inside, not a moment too soon as his phone buzzed a fourth time. Annie Calling. This time he answered in a harsh whisper.

“Hey, quit calling me. I said I’d be there.”

“Have you seen Stephen yet?” Annie sounded frantic on the other end. “What am I supposed to do? He still won’t answer his phone.”

“Just stay inside and keep the door locked. I’ll call you when I get there. And quit calling me!” He hung up before she could ask about Stephen again.

The strange absence of any creature, living or dead, greeted him as he stepped through the gate. Not a soul was on the street. It was as if the whole world had turned to zombies and they were all hiding.

Zombies hiding?

The two in the house had both been hiding, probably whoever was in the garage too. It made no sense. He wished he’d grabbed the flashlight that had fallen from the kitchen island, but maybe that wasn’t such a hot idea anyway. These things didn’t seem to be drawn toward light like mindless bugs. If anything, they were drawn to shadows. Regardless, a flashlight would attract attention.

The creatures seemed to think they needed the element of surprise. But that was impossible. The woman in the hall – he was sure it was their next-door neighbor, Karen – was blue from head to toe. She’d exhausted all the oxygen in her body long before she staggered out of that closet. No oxygen, no brain. No brain… but something made her hide.

Edge took a moment to contemplate these things. Walking Dead seemed like a distant memory now, but images from the final episodes of the season kept flashing through his head. One thing he was sure of: this was no pack of underpaid actors doctored up with latex and grease pencils. If he couldn’t ignore them, those distracting images were going to get him killed. Or worse. He shuddered again at the fate of Stephen and Dave back in the garage.

The whole world hadn’t turned to zombies. Jim hadn’t. Stephen and Dave hadn’t. Annie hadn’t and he’d promised her he’d come. He unlocked his car and climbed in. The gas needle was nearly on E, enough to make it to Annie’s though.

III – The Rescue

Once out on the boulevard, Edge passed a few wandering pedestrians. Not many. They seemed to be staggering with no sense of purpose. It was only a couple of miles to Annie’s, but the going was slow. Cars were stacked up in wreckage everywhere. Their drivers must have died suddenly and without warning. Edge wondered what had caused all the mayhem. Season one flashed through his head. A virus maybe?

Distracted by his thoughts, Edge didn’t notice the only other moving vehicle on the road, a green pickup truck speeding up Jefferson street with no lights on. Its hysterical driver was a teenage boy who had found his father and mother eating. They were eating his sister. By the time Edge saw the truck, it was too late. The two reached the intersection at the same time. In a slow-motion dream, the truck plowed into the front end of his car from the side, its unbelted driver smashed violently into his windshield, and the world went away for a while.

It was pitch black when Edge awoke to the persistent buzzing of his phone. He pulled it out and looked at it in a daze. Annie calling. He answered it, but he was instantly shocked speechless. The light from his phone illuminated the reason for the unusually dark night. A mindless throng had gathered around his car after the accident. The bodies of those in front were pressed up against it by those behind, completely obliterating any light from outside.

“Hello? Edge?”

He reached for the key and turned the ignition. The starter labored. The engine moaned and complained, pistons pumping cylinders in futile impotence.

“Edge say something. Are you okay?”

He wasn’t really. “I’m alive.”

“Thank God! Where are you? I’ve been trying to call you for almost an hour.”

“I don’t remember.” He didn’t, but it was slowly coming back.

“What do you mean you don’t remember? How can you not remember? Did Stephen ever get there?”

“Stephen’s dead.” Shit! “Oh God. I’m sorry, Annie. I didn’t mean to blurt that out. I wasn’t thinking…”

It was too late. Annie was crying pitifully. She didn’t hear a word of his apology. “What happened?” she sniffed after a while. “No don’t tell me. Is he…?”

“I don’t know. I’m so sorry. Maybe. I don’t want to think about it. Listen, I’m stuck in my car surrounded by those… those things.”

“Where?”

“I’m not sure. I think by The Plaza somewhere. Some dumb kid crashed into me and now my car won’t start.”

“Oh my God. What are you going to do?”

Edge had no idea what he was going to do. “I don’t know,” he said. “Die?”

Suddenly all the terror, shock, and hysteria were too much for Annie. She’d been crying off and on for hours. She was alone. She was scared. The world was full of zombies. Her boyfriend was dead. She started laughing.

Edge scrunched his brow up dubiously. He saw no humor in his fate. “What’s so funny?” he asked.

“Nothing,” Annie giggled. “That’s just it. It’s not funny. It’s not funny at all, not even the least little bit funny.”

“Then why are you laughing?”

“I was just thinking it’s a good thing you killed that guy after he ate Jim. You know, Jim’s such a Ganj head… the last thing we need is a zombie with the munchies.”

Edge didn’t have time to respond. He pulled the phone away from his ear and listened intently to a rumbling sound growing louder. Streetlights blinded him as the hungry throng peeled away from his car, moving in surprising quickness toward shadows. In a moment, he was alone in The Plaza’s parking lot where the collision had sent him spinning. He could see the mangled remains of the green pickup. The boy’s head had cracked through the windshield. They had pulled him through and what was left of him wasn’t enough to remember him by.

“Sorry Annie, I gotta go.” Edge reached for his bat, opened the car door and stepped out into the night. The same horrible perfume of human flesh and blood he’d smelled when Jim died hung heavy in the still night air: Essence of Teenager.

The sound that had drawn his attention was loud outside the car now and it roared ever closer, the distinctive muscle of a well-tuned, gas-guzzling V8. At first, he didn’t see anything and then into the parking lot roared a shiny new Shelby GT 500, as black as the night. Tires screaming, it spun around in a 540. The passenger door swung wide as it screeched to a stop missing him by inches.

The driver looked like something from a sci-fi film, RoboCop maybe. He was small, wore black bullet-proof body armor from head to toe, and his helmet concealed his face behind a mask so dark it caused Edge to wonder how he could see even among all the other insanity.

“Get in,” an electronic voice demanded.

Edge could only stand frozen in disbelief. The car was full of high-tech equipment that looked as military as the car’s driver.

“NOW!” But the driver didn’t wait.

In one fluid motion, one hand snatched a black assault rifle mounted to a black dash, while the other hand reached out grabbing Edge by the arm and jerking him hard into the passenger seat. As the blasts from the gun riddled a sprinting – yes sprinting, with two more hot on his heels – zombie with bullets, the driver’s foot had already stomped the accelerator to the floor.

The zombie’s teeth gnawed savagely at the air near Edge’s ear as he fell into the car. Pain shot through his whole body when the door slammed against his leg as the car sped into the night.

Edge pulled the rest of himself into the speeding car, closed the door and belted himself in. A seatbelt had already saved his life once tonight. The car sped out of the parking lot and out onto the boulevard… in the wrong direction back toward his house.

“Where are we going?” Edge asked.

“The only place we can go,” the electronic voice answered. “Nowhere.”

IV – Nowhere

“I was on my way to help my friend,” Edge suggested. Somewhere back by his car, his phone lay on the asphalt where it had fallen. It was probably buzzing insistently. Annie calling.

“No time for that,” the black-garbed crusader monotoned. “You’ve drawn their attention.”

“But I can’t just leave her there. She said those things were all around her apartment.”

The driver was silent.

“I lost my phone. I can’t even call her.”

More silence.

Edge leaned his head back in frustration. More questions swirled. Why did the man in the kitchen wait before he attacked? What made Karen hide in a closet? How the hell does a zombie sprint?

Nowhere, it turned out, meant literally that. Four more hard right turns had them headed back toward the Plaza parking lot where they’d started. The GT sped into the parking lot. Without dropping speed, it circled around to the back of the Sears building and down into the underground parking there.

“Run when I tell you to run,” buzzed from the driver’s helmet.

The car slid to a stop near a pair of sliding doors that opened automatically. Three more men, fully dressed in body armor just like the driver, stepped out with their weapons trained on the car.

“RUN!”

Edge jumped from the car and raced through the sliding doors. Bullets whistled past him. He followed the driver to the first of several elevators and turned around to see at least a hundred zombies clamoring to get through the doors behind them. Many exploded from the hail of bullets, the others trampling their fallen carcases in a mindless stampede, creating a barricade of rotten flesh. The three new RoboCop clones began retreating to the second elevator as the doors to the first closed. Edge felt himself climbing.

“Shit, they’re learning,” said the driver’s electronic voice. He pointed. A red G was illuminated on the elevator’s indicator panel.

“How can they learn with no brains?” Edge asked, not sure what that even meant.

“You’ll find out in briefing,” came the answer.

The number 4 switched from red to green. The elevator stopped. A man in a military officer’s uniform greeted him with two more soldiers in body armor.

“Light her up now, General” droned Edge’s rescuer. “Davy’s ringing for the elevator.”

“That’s impossible.” The officer’s face grew stern behind a white handle-bar mustache and matching bushy white eyebrows.

“Impossible doesn’t make it any less true.”

The doors closed and the elevator began descending. The officer nodded his head and one of the men flipped a red switch on the wall. The Sears building’s deafening fire alarm rang through the store.

“Five seconds, everyone,” yelled General. It echoed through a public address.

Small flat-screen video panels mounted everywhere showed the situation on the ground floor where the elevator was returning. The zombies had dug their way through the doorway and were tumbling through to get at the first elevator door, ignorant of the others. They had grown lethargic again like Karen was. At the sound of the alarm, the soldiers who had stayed below immediately pushed the button for the second elevator as they continued fire on the cluster of walking corpses.

“Two… one… Purge!” came the command.

The entire garage level lit up in a blinding inferno. Zombies and soldiers alike were engulfed in the flames. When the flames died down, nothing remained but smoldering ash.

“Holy shit!” Edge exclaimed. “Did you… did you just burn your own men?”

“Needs of the many,” General said gruffly.

“But they saved my life.”

“Hardly seems worth it,” General growled. “Escort him to Q.”

“I’ll do it,” the GT driver said. He took Edge by the arm and led him across the top floor of the store, barren now of commodities.

V – Dead Things that Eat Me

Sears & Roebuck’s new makeshift Security Center was located among a group of small offices at the back of the top floor. Originally designed for holding shoplifters until the police arrived, it had been rewired with equipment and wiring that had been salvaged from Hardware and Appliances on the lower floors. Wiring hung loose from holes that had been punched through the walls.

Edge was led into a room next door where he was seated at a table. The GT driver sat opposite him and unfastened his helmet. Familiar long tresses fell out as he removed it. Edge’s mouth fell open in surprise. His escort was not a man at all.

Annie shook her hair out and set the helmet aside on the table. She smiled. “Surprised? Your phone call sounded like you could use a little help,” she said. “Davy almost got you there.”

“Huh? Dave?” Edge was confused. Dave had died in the garage with Stephen.

“Davy. It’s our name for them; it’s short for cadaver. You like that?” Annie grinned proudly. “I came up with it myself.”

“You? You said you were at your apartment. I was coming to get you.”

Annie shook her head. “No, I said they were all around my apartments. I didn’t say I was there.”

“Why the hell didn’t you say you weren’t?”

Annie giggled. “I would have, but you kept hanging up on me before I got a chance.”

Edge’s head was spinning. He was beginning to feel sick again. “How long… what the hell is going on?”

“Well,” Annie began, “It was three days ago when I got here. Or was it four? Before that I don’t know. Davy was all around the apartments. There were just a hundred of them all milling around trying to get in downstairs, and then suddenly they were gone.

“It took me a while to figure out. They go into hiding, like some big game of Hide-and-Seek, only when you find one, it kind of tries to eat you.”

“Olly olly oxen free,” Edge muttered sarcastically.

Annie glared at him. “I didn’t have too much trouble getting around. They mostly gather in huge herds, so as long as you avoid places where there are a lot of hiding places, you only get the stragglers. Anyway, I was across the street from The Plaza when I saw a caravan of vehicles. It was General and his men moving to set up headquarters here.

“They almost shot me when I came running up like an idiot, but I got lucky. I was alone, so they hesitated long enough for me to yell at them. They recruited me, and here I am. At least for now. General’s going to be really pissed I brought a herd here trying to rescue you. We weren’t ready for that.”

“Annie, this is crazy. I was just watching TV a couple of hours ago and now you’re telling me I’m in the middle of some zombie apocalypse?”

“No. Well, sort of. You don’t get it do you?”

“Get what?”

“You were wrong, Edge. This is a dream. Well it was. Almost all my stories start out that way.”

Edge’s hackles were beginning to raise. “You let me come after you. I could have died out there.”

“And you still could if I wanted you to. You’re just a character in one of my stories.”

“Are you insane?”

Annie giggled again. “You wouldn’t be the first to say so.”

Edge was genuinely angry now. “You little bitch! You think this is some kind of joke? I was risking my life to save you.”

“Actually, that totally surprised me.” Annie showed honest surprise. “I wasn’t expecting you to be all heroic. You totally changed my whole story. This wasn’t how it was supposed to end at all.”

“What are you talking about?”

“You were supposed to die in the garage going to get your own crowbar. Stephen was going to be the one coming to rescue me.”

Numbness washed over Edge’s entire body as he realized in horror that Annie couldn’t possibly have known about Dave and the crowbar. He hadn’t said a word to her about it.

“Light bulb?” Annie smiled again.

Edge stared at her in numb silence. “How was the story going to end?”

“Stephen was going to get there too late. I was already going to be a zombie and when he came into my apartment, I was going to catch him by surprise and eat him.”

“Annie, that’s disgusting. You were going to eat your own boyfriend?”

“Hey, you know what? We’re done. I told you I don’t do dead things that eat me.”

© 2014 Anne Schilde