Dead Sea

Chapter One

I didn’t shoot the bitch until she started eating Alan’s face. Before this whole thing began, I’d never shot anyone in my life. Not once. I never held a gun until a few weeks before Hamelin’s Revenge started. Hell, I never even referred to women as bitches. But that’s what she was. And I had the pistol in my hand.

And I shot her.

Cue “Hey Joe” by Jimi Hendrix.

This thing… this plague; it changed people. Not just the dead ones, either. It changed everyone. Changed me. I’m a different person now. Listen… you never know what you’ll do until you find yourself in an impossible situation, so don’t ever say never. Survival instinct is a real motherfucker, and when your back is. against the wall, everything changes. Everything. I know. It did for me. It all changed for me.

My name is Lamar Reed and this is the way the world ended.

It started with the rats. They swarmed out of the sewers about a month ago. Well, maybe swarmed isn’t the right word. Swarm indicates speed, and the rats were anything but fast. The first attack took place in New York City during the evening rush hour. Imagine it. Sidewalks bustling with activity, crowds of people rushing to catch subways and trains and buses, streets choked with gridlock, taxi-cabs weaving in and out of traffic, horns blaring, manhole covers clanging as trucks drive over them. And then, in the middle of all this chaos, the rats slowly crawled out of a sewer grate on Thirty-first Street and attacked people-climbed up legs, raked at stomachs with their sharp little claws, sank their yellowed incisors into cheeks and thighs and necks; anywhere they could find a soft morsel. The rats fed.

And the rats were dead. I should mention that. Wasn’t weird enough that rats attacked commuters en masse. They were dead rats-guts hanging out, limbs and tails falling off, and big, ulcerated wounds on their sides, infested with maggots. Rotting meat on the run.

Oh, we didn’t know it at first. I remember watching it on the news that evening. Sitting on my couch in East Baltimore, eating bologna straight from the package and ignoring the stack of overdue bills. Watching the news, wondering when the cable would get shut off for non-payment. Wondering where the hell my unemployment check was. The mail lady hadn’t brought it yet, and things were tight. I’d come up with some cash a few weeks before, but it all went to my mortgage. Like sticking one finger in the dam while three dozen more leaks sprang up.

The news caught my attention because of the fucked-up factor. Rats attacking pedestrians? Crazy shit. But when the first reports started trickling in that they were dead rats—not dead as in some frantic stockbroker flung one to the ground and stomped it—but dead as in the living dead? That shit was off the hook. People scoffed, the media pundits argued, and the authorities refused comment. The cable news channels carried live footage. MSNBC called it a riot. CNN speculated about a possible terrorist attack. I don’t know what Fox News called it because nobody I know watched Fox News. One thing that appeared clear was that nobody knew what the fuck was going on. New York’s hospitals filled up with wounded pedestrians. Most of them suffered from bites, and others had been injured in the chaos that followed—trampled on as people fled. A few suffered heart attacks brought on by the stress. The people who’d been bitten got real sick. Then died. Then came back. Just like the rats.

They were dead, but they still came back.

The media called it Hamelin’s Revenge. They came up with the name almost immediately. Hamelin’s Revenge: the return of the rats the Pied Piper was hired to get rid of. But in that old story, when the mayor refused to pay, Hamelin—the Pied Piper—came up with another plan. That’s how they spun it, anyway. Seems nobody bothered to tell the media that Hamelin was the name of the town, not the Piper himself. But that didn’t matter. In their version, Hamelin’s Revenge was when the Piper decided to get even. He took all the kids away and returned the rats to the village. Now the fairy tale had come true. The rats returned all right. And hell followed with them. Just like the Bible verse or the song. Hell.

By midnight, New York City’s hospitals became slaughterhouses. Like I said, the infected died, and then came back. And they came back hungry, man. Zombies. The White House press secretary actually used the word during a news conference. Until then, the media were calling the attackers cannibals. But after the government confirmed it, zombie was the buzzword. They attacked the living just like the rats had done. They bit and clawed and fed, gorging themselves on the flesh of the living. The victims who managed to escape got sick with Hamelin’s Revenge a few hours later, just like their attackers had. Then they died and came back. And the ones that got ripped to pieces, the ones who ended up (for the most part) inside the zombie’s bellies? What was left of them came back, too. They didn’t need arms or legs or internal organs. As long as there was a brain left attached, something to control the motor function and impulses, the remains came back. A CNN anchor actually walked away from the news desk after they showed footage of an armless corpse wandering the streets, trailing intestines behind it like a dog leash. You could hear her sobbing off camera, and some producer or technician begging her to go back on the air. She never did.

The chaos spread throughout the five boroughs. By dawn, the National Guard locked down New York City and quarantined everything. Blockaded the bridges and tunnels and left folks to die. A few soldiers even fired on civilians as they were trying to escape. Gunned them down in the dawn’s early light. It was for the good of the country, the media assured us. New York was a biohazard area. Nobody could get in or out. But Hamelin’s Revenge managed to escape. Hamelin’s Revenge said “Fuck you” to the barricades and armed guardsmen and quarantine signs. The disease raced like a California brushfire. Cases popped up in Newark, Delaware; then Trenton, New Jersey; and then on to Philadelphia. By the next evening, it had arrived here in Baltimore. Martial law was declared nationwide and the army was mobilized. That was like pouring perfume on a pig. The troops were good at killing zombies, but they couldn’t shoot a disease. All it took was one bite from an infected mouth. And you could get it even if you weren’t bitten. One drop of blood sprayed from a bullet’s exit wound. Pus from an open sore splattering on you as a zombie attacked. Inhale it or ingest it; get it on your lips or in your eye and that was it. Say good-bye. You got sick. You died. You returned. Folks that died from heart attacks or cancer or stabbings or car wrecks—they stayed dead. But anyone who came into direct contact with the zombies—anyone who managed to get infected—joined the ranks of the living dead.

And those ranks swelled quickly. First the rats. Then people. The disease jumped to dogs and cats in the second week. Other animals, too. They said on television that a cow attacked an Amish farmer in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. It sounds kind of funny until you think about it for too long. Then it just becomes a mind-fuck. Zombie cattle… this time the hamburger eats you—starring Lou Diamond Phillips and Mr. T. Sounded like a really bad Sci-Fi Channel movie.

Elsewhere, a pack of dead coyotes ripped a mother and her baby to shreds in the Hollywood hills. Gruesome shit. A herd of zombie goats devoured ranch hands in Montana. An undead bear caused chaos on the Ohio turnpike. At least the disease didn’t spread to the birds. If it had, well… for years we’d worried about the avian flu. The idea of birds spreading Hamelin’s Revenge was terrifying, because birds are everywhere. No matter where you go, there are birds. Ain’t anywhere you can run where a bird can’t find your ass. The birds didn’t catch it, at least that we’d seen, but many other animals did. Not all of them, but enough. Sheep caught it, but not pigs. Horses were immune, but cattle were not. Apes—death equaled zombie. Deer—their deaths were old school.

And of course, some species that seemed immune at first later became vulnerable. Squirrels didn’t seem affected at first, which was weird, since they’re just rats with fluffy tails. But later, they caught it, too. With all the cross-species jumps, there was no stopping the disease. It happened very quickly. America fell. South America. Canada. Then Hamelin’s Revenge made it overseas and infected Europe and Asia and the African continent. Then it traveled down to Australia. Last thing I saw before the power went out for good was grainy footage of a million zombie rats swarming over a million humans in Mumbai, India.

Suddenly, I didn’t have to worry about past—due utility bills or if the cops had figured out that I was the one who robbed the Ford dealership during that test-drive. I didn’t have to think about whether or not I had the balls to do it again. I had more important things to focus on, like staying alive and not getting eaten by my neighbors—or shot by some stupid motherfucker.

See, it wasn’t just the zombies that we had to watch out for. If it was, and if the president and Homeland Security and the Centers for Disease Control and the rest of our government had acted quickly enough, then maybe none of this would have happened. But they didn’t. Just like Pearl Harbor and 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina and all the other national disasters. When faced with an unimaginable crisis, the government failed to respond in an effective and timely manner. Maybe they couldn’t. I mean, there’s probably no FEMA playbook for what to do when dead folks start running around eating people. It’s not the sort of thing the government plans for. It’s an unimaginable scenario.

But it wasn’t imagination. It was real.

In the weeks that followed there were dangers other than just the zombies. Looters and gangs of armed thugs roamed the streets. Cops and National Guardsmen who’d gone off the deep end shot the dead and living indiscriminately. America returned to the glory days of the Old West. Things like innocence and guilt didn’t matter. The only law that mattered was the law of the gun. They evacuated Washington, D.C., and sent the president, his cabinet, and all the king’s horses and men who worked in the House and the Senate off to secure underground bunkers in Virginia and Maryland and Pennsylvania. They were supposed to be able to run the country from there. They didn’t. Things fell apart.

Our cities and towns resembled Somalia or Beirut. Well, to be honest, my neighborhood had been like that even before Hamelin’s Revenge. Only difference was now the rest of the country got a taste of what it was like to live in the ghetto. Instead of drug gangs and tweaked-out freaks on crystal meth or crack, we now had vigilantes and zombies. Not much of a change, and in either case, the cops still didn’t show up when you called them.

I remember a press conference with the secretary of state. He was sweating like a pig. Looked nervous. He assured the reporters that President Tyler, the vice president, and cabinet members were all fine—and that the crisis was passing. Things would soon be under control, and society would return to normal. Until then, martial law would remain in effect as a cautionary measure.

Except that nobody was calling the shots. The person in charge was the guy with the most firepower, and that changed from moment to moment.

People didn’t aspire to cure the disease or stop it from spreading. They only aspired to not get eaten by a zombie. They’d always worried about their careers and homes and favorite television shows and what their most-loved Hollywood starlet had done. Now the only thing they worried about was staying alive. And the worst part was that if you’d asked people, they probably couldn’t tell you why they bothered resisting. Did it matter? What was the point? The zombies outnumbered the living. Why not surrender, or eat a bullet? Like I said, survival instinct is a motherfucker. You do what you have to, even if you don’t understand why.

Some people had higher aspirations, of course. When there’s blood on the streets, there’s money to be made. That’s an eternal law in the ghetto, and the rest of the world learned it soon enough. Stocks, bonds, shit like that—worthless. Cold hard cash ruled the day, and price gouging was common. Twenty bucks for a gallon of gas or a bottle of water. And when the cash became as worthless as the paper it was printed on, the barter system took over. Your wife—your daughter—in exchange for what you needed to survive.

The madness continued. Burning the dead became the law, but there weren’t enough fire pits or crematories to go around. Last bit of the news I saw, in Pennsylvania, a National Guard officer had reportedly ordered the death of civilians by firing squad. They were accused of looting. In Miami, zombies overran the airport. A popular television preacher committed suicide, believing that the Rapture had occurred and he’d missed it. In China, a nuclear reactor went into meltdown. Chicago and Phoenix were on fire. The military finally retreated from New York City after losing control and admitting defeat.

More people died every day. Then they came back. And every day there were less of us. It was a cruel, cruel summer.

I stayed inside. Didn’t have any family. My mama died years ago. Breast cancer. Our health insurance sucked. There wasn’t much they could do, in any case. Found a lump during a routine exam. Three months later, she was gone. I never knew my old man. Heard he was useless. That’s all I knew of him. “Mama, tell me about my dad.” “He was useless.” I had a brother, Marcus, who lived in California. Hadn’t seen him in years, and when the phones went down, I had no way of contacting him. I hadn’t been in a serious relationship in a long time—not since my last partner, Louis, moved to New Orleans. I had no one to worry about. So I hid. I was safe inside my home, and had no reason to leave.

The big thing I had to deal with was the passage of time. Trapped inside the house all day and all night with no television or Xbox or shit like that. I had to find things to occupy my mind, because otherwise I’d get very depressed and start thinking about walking outside, finding the nearest zombie, and letting him have a bite. The loneliness was the worst part, and that’s why I was glad when I found out Alan was alive and he joined me (even if he was hopelessly straight). Alan was my neighbor. Nice enough guy. He’d worked at the plant too, and got laid off the same time as me. Alan took a gig with a temp agency. Did odd jobs like flagging traffic and loading trucks. Some days they had work for him. Some days they didn’t. He barely scraped by. But he’d never once let his spirits get down. He was a funny, jovial person. After he’d moved in (because his house wasn’t as secure) my loneliness vanished.

But eventually, with his added presence, supplies went quicker than I’d imagined. With the power out, the food in the fridge had spoiled and the kitchen smelled like the zombies. I still had plenty of beer, canned goods, and packaged foods. Had plenty of water, too. We pissed in empty beer bottles so the toilet water would remain untainted. I figured we could drink from the commode if necessary.

When we ran out of food, we had to venture out. That was when I participated in looting the Safeway. I know what you’re thinking. Black man, late-twenties… of course he looted the grocery store. Well fuck you. It wasn’t like that. I grew up hard. Lived in an old row house in the middle of Druid Hill Park. Place was a fucking dump. We had rags stuffed in the cracks in the walls and plastic over the windows in the wintertime to keep out the cold. My childhood pets were all cockroaches. The neighborhood was filthy-garbage on the sidewalks and dead grass and broken glass covering the vacant lots. I saw my friends get gunned down in the streets. Saw their dried blood on the sidewalks. Saw the cops and the preachers shrug in resigned consignation. They didn’t care. Neither did anybody else. Only time people gave a fuck was during an election year—or if somebody white and wealthy got killed. I spent my childhood in shit. I stepped on crack vials every time I went outside to play. Drugs were all around me. So was crime. It was a way of life. But I didn’t buy into that shit. I lived my life differently. Stayed in school. Worked a job. Never did drugs. Never boozed. Never robbed anybody. Like I said, until the stick-up at the dealership, I’d never held a gun in my life. And I ain’t proud of that incident. But shove your stereotypes up your ass. I’m educated. No college, but I graduated high school. Not that GED shit, either. I actually went to class and got my diploma the old-fashioned way. I read a lot and watched Discovery Channel. I didn’t talk like a thug. Didn’t feel the need to emulate a rapper. Ground my teeth every time some well-meaning white acquaintance deferred to me at a party when the conversation turned to basketball or slave reparations or Colin Powell’s run for president or hip-hop. I didn’t flash the bling. I respected women. Didn’t view them as ho’s. Didn’t hang out in front of the liquor store. Thought P Diddy was a douche bag. Vote or die? Fuck you, you stupid, conceited, fronting motherfucker. I felt the same way about Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, too. They were supposed to identify with what I’d been through? Please. None of them spoke for me. I didn’t feel the need to respect them just because we shared the same skin color. Didn’t drape myself in gold jewelry. Didn’t let my pants sag around my fucking ankles. I refused to let a media-inspired culture influence how I dressed, talked, walked, thought, or behaved.

Don’t talk to me about equal rights. I got it from both sides. The quiet, almost apologetic racism from white America, and the more flagrant disapproval from my own race, simply because I refused to live up to what they’d been conditioned to think an African-American should be. My peers thought there was something wrong with me simply because I refused to act like a thug.

And even on good days, when I’d faced down each and every one of the stereotypes that comes with being a black man—even then I’d be met with a whole bunch more prejudice because of my sexual orientation.

Think that it’s hard being black? Try being a gay black male sometime.

Hamelin’s Revenge not withstanding…

The biggest stereotype of all was my steady employment. People either expected me to deal drugs, live off welfare, or be a fucking limp-wrist hairdresser. I don’t know why. There’s nothing about me that’s either gangsta or feminine. Maybe they’d watched too much New Jack City or Will & Grace. I had a good job on the assembly line at the Ford plant in White Marsh, and I kept it. Thing was, it didn’t keep me. That’s what led me to the Ford dealership with a gun stuffed in my waistband. And I was living with the guilt of what I’d done there up until Hamelin’s Revenge came along.

I was thinking about that very thing when Alan and I looted the Safeway.

We showed up at the Safeway’s parking lot in the middle of the night and found a dozen other well-armed people with the same plan. We grabbed two shopping carts and joined in before the shelves were picked clean. The cops weren’t around, and neither were the zombies. The other looters ignored us, busy making due for themselves. Four of them stuck together in a group. The others appeared to be loners.

The meat department and the produce aisles smelled like an open sewer. The stench of rotting vegetation and spoiled meat hung thick in the air. I heard a droning buzz, and noticed that the butcher’s display cases were covered with fat, sluggish flies. Thousands of tiny white worms burrowed through rancid steaks and hamburger and pork chops. I remember wondering as I watched them if Hamelin’s Revenge could spread to insects—mosquitoes, ticks, or other bloodsuckers. I hoped not. If it could spread to them or to the birds, we were pretty much fucked.

But then again, we were pretty much fucked anyway.

The fruit and vegetables in the produce department were covered with fuzz and slime and more flies. We held our breath when we passed through the aisle, and again when we cut through the dairy products section. Exploded cardboard milk cartons were thick with green-blue mold and the stench was overwhelming. A fat man in a soiled T-shirt sat on the floor, his back against one of the coolers, and ate spoiled milk with a spoon, scooping it from the carton like cottage cheese.

“Hey,” Alan said, “you’re gonna get sick, dude. That shit will kill you.”

The man smiled sadly. “I hope so. I ain’t got the guts to shoot myself, or to let one of those things bite me.”

“Suicide?” I frowned. “Why die at all?”

The man shoveled another spoonful of sludge into his mouth. It dribbled down his chin as he replied, “Don’t you guys see? We only got two options. We can join them or we can feed them. Either way, we’re dead.”

A tear slid down his cheek. We walked away without another word.

“He’s just given up,” Alan said when we were out of earshot.

“Fuck that,” I said. “I’m going to fight.”

“You ever wonder why?”

“Why what?”

“Why we fight to survive? Why we sit in your house going stir crazy? I mean, what’s the alternative? Shit ain’t gonna get better. It’s just gonna get worse. Why bother?”

I didn’t have an answer for him.

Alan and I filled our carts with bottled water; canned vegetables, fruit, and meat; dry goods like cereal and oatmeal; batteries; aspirin; hydrogen peroxide; antibacterial cream; bandages; vitamins; cigarette lighters; matches; and other things we could use. He grabbed a few small propane cylinders for my grill, but I made him put them back. Even if we’d had fresh meat or veggies to put on the grill, the smell of cooking would attract predators—living and otherwise.

A fly landed on Alan’s forearm as he reached for a box of granola bars. He gave a small, disgusted cry and slapped at it. When he took his hand away, the insect was squashed all over his arm. He let it fall to the floor, and then wiped his arm on his shirt. I wondered if he’d been thinking the same thing I had about the bugs.

“You ready, Lamar?” He shoved his cart forward.

“Yeah,” I said. “Let’s go home.”

“Home?” He snorted. “Is that what it is these days?”

I didn’t answer.

We now had enough goods in our two carts to last us a month. Maybe more if we rationed. I figured we’d hunker down and stay barricaded inside my house and wait to see what happened next. On our way to the exit, I added a case of warm beer almost as an afterthought. We passed by the cash registers. It felt weird not paying. Then we got the hell out of there. Our fellow looters weren’t arguing with each other, but the whole place had an underlying mood of fear. It felt like any moment the whole store could explode.

Or the zombies could show up.

We were on our way back home when it happened. The streets were deserted, except for abandoned vehicles. Most of them were either wrecked or shot up. A few had been burned. The damp pavement shined. It had rained earlier in the day. With the power out, there were no lights to mark our way, but the moon was full and round. Its dull glow was strangely comforting. Broken glass crunched under our feet. The wheel on Alan’s cart squeaked. Somewhere, a dog barked. A distant gunshot echoed off the buildings. A plane passed overhead, red and blue lights blinking in the darkness. I wondered who was on it and where they were going. The wind shifted, bringing the smell of decay. It was the end of August and summer would soon be over, but the days were still sweltering, the nights barely tolerable. The heat really compounded the stench of the dead, but that was a good thing. You could smell them coming before you saw them. We sped up our pace.

An undead cat lay twitching in the road, unable to move. Its spine had been crushed and a fresh tire tread stood out in its burst stomach. On the sidewalk, something that might have been a dead crow had congealed into a puddle of tissue. Nose wrinkling, Alan steered his shopping cart around the mess, and the squeaky wheel squealed in protest. I glanced at the worms squirming in the bird’s remains and wondered again if they were alive or dead.

The quick breeze died down and the heat returned—as did the stench. We stayed aware; kept looking over our shoulders. The wheel on my shopping cart kept going crooked, making it a real pain in the ass to push. Every time I hit a stone or piece of broken glass, I had to shove extra hard. When we came across a cracked and rutted section of sidewalk, I wheeled the cart into the street. As we passed by a sewer drain, I noticed a severed head lying against the curb, right over the grating. A few flaps of flesh hung below the chin, but that was it. Water swirled past the head, trickling down into the drain. As we watched, a black tongue slithered from its mouth like a slug. The blue eyes turned up to watch us pass.

“Should we kill it?” Alan asked.

“It’s already dead.”

“You know what I mean.”

I shrugged. “Why bother. It can’t hurt anybody. It’s just a head.”

“Fucking creepy.”

“Yeah.”

“How long you figure it can survive like that?”

“Until it rots away, I guess. It doesn’t have a stomach or anything. But look at it. I bet if we stuck our fingers down there, it would snap at us. Whatever this disease does, these things operate on instinct. Kind of like a shark. All a shark does is swim and eat. All these things do is walk and eat. It can’t walk anymore. But it’s still hungry. Bet it stays hungry until its brain dissolves.”

Alan stared down at the head. “Wonder if they think.”

I didn’t reply, because I didn’t know. Alan cocked his foot back and kicked the head like a football. It sailed off into the night. There was a wet splat as it bounced off the hood of an abandoned car.

“Field goal.” Alan grinned. “I should play for the Ravens.”

“Come on,” I said. “Let’s get this stuff home while the coast is still clear.”

We’d gone two more blocks when it happened. Alan was armed with a sword. He’d picked it up during a vacation in Tijuana. It was a cheap piece of junk, but he’d sharpened the blade and practiced with it in my kitchen. Before they all rotted, he’d gotten pretty good at slicing cantaloupes in half, but he hadn’t yet had the opportunity to try it on a zombie. I was carrying a pistol. I don’t know what kind. As I said, I was never much of a gun aficionado. During the dealership robbery, I’d used a Ruger.22 pistol, purchased hot downtown. Bought a box of ammo to go with it. I’d thrown both into the harbor afterward. When things broke down a few weeks later, I’d wished I still had it. This new gun was a revolver. I knew that much. Didn’t know anything else, except that if I pulled the trigger, I’d shoot something. I’d been calling it a pistol, and Alan had tried correcting me, saying it wasn’t a pistol, but a revolver. I didn’t see the difference. Didn’t care, either, as long as it worked. I’d picked it up off a dead guy lying in the middle of the intersection. We’d come across him on our way to the grocery store. After some experimentation, I figured out how to get the cylinder open. There were four bullets inside.

Like Alan and his sword, I hadn’t had to use them yet.

Until that zombie bitch shuffled out of the bushes…

Here’s the thing about zombies. You can get the fuck away from them easily enough. They’re usually quiet, but they’re also slow and stupid. You see them coming, so it’s real easy to run away. And like I said earlier, even if you don’t see them, you can usually smell the fuckers. Ever smell roadkill? It’s the same thing, except mobile. But that night, the breeze kept shifting. First it would blow off the Chesapeake Bay and away from us. Then it would switch, but that was no better, because the stench of decay would get so strong you couldn’t tell if it was a zombie approaching you or just the city itself—a giant graveyard full of rotting corpses.

We passed by a small row house with a withered, brown hedge out front. The windows were broken. The aluminum siding was splattered with gore. The zombie must have come from behind the hedge, because that was the only spot to hide. We didn’t see her, didn’t smell her, until she’d latched on to Alan.

He was behind me, talking in hushed tones about getting out of the city and heading for the wilderness—the woods in Pennsylvania or southern Maryland. Maybe even down to the outskirts of Ocean City, around some of the more desolate beach areas. I was against it. Thought we should just stay inside my place. We didn’t know shit about what was going on elsewhere. What if the woods were full of infected animals? I waited for Alan to reply. His shopping cart coasted past me and out into the street. At the same time, he started screaming.

I let go of my cart and whipped around. The zombie clung to Alan, scratching and biting. This close, her stench made me gag. She wrapped her swollen, rotting arms around Alan like an exuberant lover and then clambered onto his back. She held on tightly. He buckled under her weight, but managed to maintain his footing. Her feet dangled off the ground. She wore no shoes or socks and her toes were caked with filth.

Alan dropped his sword. It clanged onto the pavement. Panicked, I could only watch as he hunched over, beating at the harpy clinging to his back. The creature moaned and he shrieked. Her cracked fingernails raked at his arm and neck, ripping his skin. She leaned forward and her teeth snapped shut on his cheek. The dead woman jerked her head back and Alan’s flesh stretched like soft taffy. Alan screamed again, and even in the darkness I could see the blood welling up inside his mouth. His skin stretched even farther, pulled taught, and then tore. His flapping cheek dangled from the zombie’s clenched teeth. His screams turned into a gurgle. Other than her brief moan, the corpse didn’t make a sound.

It was then that I remembered the gun. It had been clenched in my hand the whole time, but I’d been so fucking overwhelmed with shock and fear that I’d forgotten about it. The zombie’s head was thrown back away from Alan’s left shoulder. She was chewing the piece of meat while he thrashed and spun. Blood streamed down his neck, soaking his clothing. His skin looked garish and pale, and I saw his teeth and his tongue flopping around in the ragged hole. Amazingly, he didn’t collapse. He kept beating at her, making gargling sounds in his throat. When he spun around again, I raised the pistol. The zombie’s head darted forward for another bite.

I stepped close, put the gun against her forehead and pulled the trigger. At the same time, I turned my face away, closed my eyes and kept my mouth shut tight, pursing my lips together so that no blood would splatter into my mouth. The pistol jumped in my grip. There was an explosion. Over the zombie’s stench, I smelled burned hair and gun smoke.

The zombie went limp, slumped, and then slid to the asphalt like a sack of cement. Alan collapsed to his knees. He tried to scream again, but the sound was garbled. He sounded like a wild animal. His eyes rolled up at me, wide and horrified. Sweat and blood covered what was left of his face. He tried to speak, but I could barely understand him.

“Shloo eeee…”

“Oh, fuck.” I backed away from him. Alan was dead. Even if I managed to stop the bleeding and somehow patch up his face, he’d been bitten. Hamelin’s Revenge was already coursing through his veins. He’d died the moment she broke the skin.

I heard the sound of tinkling glass from a nearby alley. The zombies were on the move, attracted by the gunshot.

“Laarr,” Alan slurred. “Shloo eeee.”

Lamar, shoot me.…

I raised the gun. My hands trembled.

“I’m sorry, man. I am so fucking sorry.”

I did as he asked. I shot him.

Like I said, things have changed. People have changed. Me included. I didn’t even look away. The gunshot echoed into the night. Somewhere, another dog barked. Another rotting corpse shuffled into sight. When it saw me, it grinned and made a low moaning noise. Blinking away tears, I raised the pistol, and then lowered it again. The zombie was too far away to shoot with accuracy and I didn’t want to waste bullets.

I forgot about the shopping carts and ran home. I saw more zombies but stayed out of their reach. They lurched out of alleyways and stumbled out of houses and apartment buildings. I didn’t see anybody else who was still alive, but I heard a woman screaming. Couldn’t tell where she was, and in truth, I didn’t stick around long enough to see. When a rat skittered by me and disappeared behind a parked car, I nearly screamed. I didn’t know if it was dead or alive. I wondered if I should consider myself lucky to be alive, or cursed because I wasn’t dead yet. Of course, if I were dead, I’d be a zombie. I wondered if they knew—remembered—who they’d been. If there was such a thing as a soul, was it still inside them, conscious and staring out through those dead eyes, unable to act as its body was hijacked?

Then I decided that I wasn’t ready to find out yet.