I wait for her as the receding warmth of summer’s evening lulls me in the watchtower, staring at the same field, the same menacing highway in the darkness as I’ve done on countless nights of guard duty; maintaining perpetual vigilance that the people may see one more dawn. It’s in the pale light of changing day that I yearn for her most; the girl who gathered wild raspberries in shrubby woodlands by the road, held my hand as we walked together, and called me Papa.

We shouldn’t have waited for the end of the world to post our guards and build our walls. Who knows how many could have been saved? We knew the cancerous asphalt scar reaching towards us from the horizon delivered evil to our reservation, bringing death on its slithering back in ever-evolving forms of opioids; and stealing our children in the vanishing red glow of tail lights. But the people were vanquished, numb to our sorrows, and helpless before the world.

Dew condenses on the pine boards enclosing the tower, trickling down in rivulets where others have gone before. My elbow rests in the firm, sand-bagged wall as a breeze whispers over leafy poplar trees, stirring deep shadows in and out of being amongst the pale trunks. Heavy eyelids fight against the cricket lullaby rising from overgrown lawns and ditches; resisting sleep and the inevitable nightmares.

The ground trembles with a double knock from below, startling me from the twilight of consciousness. A square hatch swings up from the entry port, lantern light glints in the seam— a monster’s golden iris narrowed in the instant before striking. My mind knows it’s my partner Bobby coming up to rejoin me on watch, but my heart jackhammers in a flood of catalytic chemicals. My breathing shallows as I clutch the polymer-stocked rifle, ready to bear down and blast the intruder.

A steel thermos thunks on boards as Bobby ascends the ladder, propping the butt of his shotgun on the plywood floor to help haul his weight, considerable even two years after the collapse, onto the creaking platform. The door falls shut behind him, and the gleaming eye returns to its lurking fade. My hands unclench, and my heart beats on as Bobby’s bulldog wheeze drowns out the crickets.

He groans and shifts himself atop a barstool, letting his gun slide against the glistening wall to settle in the corner, “There’s corn soup.”

“Any bannock?”

“Yup. Smoked fish too.”

“Hmm.”

I grunt acknowledgment, the hmm of a people accustomed to stoic suffering and emotions as fierce as the current under the deceptive icy stillness of our homeland’s winter rivers. There’s no bannock left—hmm. Your dog died—hmm. Your daughter’s missing—hmm. The dead have returned to plague the living; well, that earned a whistle and a dragged-out holy.

The regular labour of Bobby’s breathing masks the silence in the tower until rays of bloody gold bathe the decaying highway, capping off another night of waiting. My partner waddles off to fib a second breakfast from the cooks, leaving me to wait, fingers tingling on my rifle, for our replacements.

My head aches as I descend the ladder to the shipping container below the battlements and extinguish the venomous hissing of the naphtha lantern. The rations are simple fare compared to our before-times diet, but healthier and processed only by the hands of the people. Birds flutter about the ground outside the steel door, and we break our fast together. With the band adapting to living united again under a single roof, meals have been a return to social tradition where families come together to share in the day’s joys and troubles. For me, they are more troubles than joy.

There is little traffic on the enclosed streets of the reservation. A pair of guards straggle home from duty, and a young girl in a bright winter coat skips along towards the gardens clutching a thermos destined for some relation there. My spirit warms at her passage, but in so thawing, bleeds fresh. Teeth pinch my tongue, and I tear my gaze from her. The ramshackle walls lining the new centre of our community are solid, obscuring the view of ancestral forests and the lands we once freely inhabited… I prefer it this way, safe from the stranger.

The old houses lay along the road in lines of ruin, as if victims before the firing squad where scavengers for the community centre have left worthless plaster skins and connective tissues of dirty orange insulation to show they had once lived. To be fair, this was how the Rez had always looked. Apocalypse had visited the people long before it ravaged the towns of our white neighbours, keeping the dead now from their sacred rest.

We had been quick to recognize the need to come together and secure our partitioned home in the days following the collapse, before the highway strobed with vehicles fleeing to nowhere, and before those passengers died in the first cold snap; only to resurrect as the terrible deer people from ancient myth—eldritch wendigos swarming the swampy woods and grasslands around the Rez.

My pulse only begins to slow as I grab a pair of axes from their place on the wall before stepping out into the misty air. I should be slipping onto my cot, reading a book maybe or wasting time on a puzzle like a good elder; but to rest is to reflect, and to reflect is to risk drowning in the chill pool of memory.

Walking corpses shuffle nearby, close enough for even my aged ears to hear. They track my movements; a benign malevolence felt as much as heard. Sheet-metal and road signs creak in their anchorage on the chain-link fence either side of the gate, not covering enough space to fully obscure the construction. Rotting eyes glowing with obsession rotate through the gaps, taking it in their turn to behold me; calling for me to join them with their raspy groans.

The tower overlooks part of the muskeg from which there seems no end to the dead who emerge from its slimy embrace, impassable to all but the restless wretches; and a stretch of the dreaded highway. The deer people wander in down the old asphalt scar on occasion, that’s only natural. But why the muskeg? Why a handful every day? The other elders argue into late nights but can never agree. I know the reason. That’s why I volunteered for tower duty.

The gate guards arrive late, but they know I don’t mind; a pair of young men to stand sentry while the people greet the day. Let them enjoy these rare moments of peace. I have none left.

They know by now not to argue about my inclusion in the morning chores, and the oldest of the two takes the spare axe from my hand. “Ready Uncle?”

“Hmm.”

I hand my rifle to the other boy, who disappears into the shipping container, and tighten my grip on the tool; worn from years of hard use, and too many strokes of the sharpening stone.

The morning’s labour crowds the gateway, reaching out with atrophied arms, slavering and groaning in desperate hunger, sloughing off shreds of tattered flesh against the sagging chain-link. Five newcomers; four of them whites. The last is one of us, a young woman finally come home.

“Okay nephew,” I call to the boy who is not my nephew. He skips along the fence, rattling and thumping the butt of the axe against sheet metal to lure the famished dead away from the gate. Most follow, but the nearest remains, fixing me with his savage gaze.

The locking bar creaks under my hand and I drive my boot heel against the metal, swinging the gate into the dead man and knocking him to the weedy turf. Steel clangs shut behind as the wendigo focuses its poor coordination on rising to his battered, shoeless feet. The axe sinks into the back of his skull, and he sprawls on the ground like a discarded marionette.

The others see and stagger away from the fence, closing the distance with deceptively slow movements. More than once I’ve seen them overwhelm others who thought they had more time: but they’re no threat to me out here in the open. The young man in the tower shouts for me to wait, but there is no need to worry; not with only four.

I pace to the side, manoeuvring until the corpses knock into each other in their scramble to claim me, and the girl tumbles underfoot. The other three fall victim to the swing-connect-retreat combination perfected over countless morning cleanups. The weight of the axe needs little motivation to cleave through bone, and stepping back while twisting the handle frees the tool—giving me more time to address the next threat.

She’s the last to approach. Not her, but what she might have been had she been given time to grow up. It’s not her. Even through the gore-smeared flesh of her face, the bone structure isn’t the same. She would’ve looked different, thinner cheeks and shorter probably, but I can’t raise the axe.

She stumbles forward, grasping at the fabric of my shirt. I would know, even after all these decades. I would know my daughter even now in the rags of her own leathered skin, slick with mud and stinking of rot. I know this ghoul isn’t her, but I can’t raise the axe.

Is that fear in her gaze as she reaches? What of her own father? Is he out there somewhere, awaiting her return?

Her rabid eyes bulge and separate like a chameleon’s as my not-nephew buries his blade down to the poll in her skull. She topples to the ground, and the black contents of her cranium cling to the axe as it parts flesh with a squelch. “Holy uncle. Just could’ve had you.”

Humid air stifles my breathing, the tattoo of my blood pulses in my ears like the beating of a hundred pow-wow drums. I lean on my knees to find my wind as pain twinges in my back, “Miigwech, my boy.”

“Hmm.” There is no ‘you’re welcome’ in our language, only the humility of acknowledgment.

The younger man with the rifle scratches his nose and calls down to me from the platform as I try to hide my shaking hands by wiping down the tool. “Go back and get some sleep, uncle. Almost died, frig.”

“Weenuk. I would’ve had her, never mind.” But I wouldn’t have. My arms thrill from the effort of my chores, and fog obscures my mind. Sweat drips freely down to the gravel from my saturated scalp, and my heart hammers with irregular persistence.

He’s right about the sleep, and not the first to mention it. Survival was supposed to get easier over time with the habitual confirmation of life in the new world of black and white; alive and dead. Instead, the weight builds every day, hidden wounds tear deeper and colours fade another hue.

The youths chatter behind me as I make to return to the community centre, reliving the near-miss and weaving a legend to impress the girls around the campfire later. Why not? Let them forge ahead and bring new children into this world. My shaking legs barely allow the dignity of feigned nonchalance after the encounter; they lack the strength to carry the band much longer.

Our lives are more lethal now, yet safer than they’ve ever been. The next generation will not fear the highway as we did in my day, the abyss into which brothers and cousins but most of all daughters and sisters were lost. The scar was no longer the domain of the stranger, the hunting ground of living monsters with human faces masking demon souls; the before-times, and all their troubles. The next generation will master the crumbling road, tranquil now with the benign threat of the dead, and in time hunt the ancestral lands of our people. Theirs is the future.

As for us relics of the old world? My breathing hasn’t evened, and my arms still tingle by the time I collapse onto my cot; and most my age are unhealthier. We’d been poisoned our whole lives before: the drugs, the plastic, the processed food. Gone too late for us, time enough for them.

My head still aches in the early evening when I abandon another attempt at sleep; my bedding soaked through to the cot with sweat shed in frantic half-moments of disturbed rest.

I join the guards at the watchtower. A different pair than this morning, but both used to me and my sleepless ways; and both recently married before the people. They accept my offer to relieve them before my watch has officially started with an air of anticipation: “Miigwech uncle.”

“Hmm.”

One grins and passes me a cloth parcel before whooping high and loud, in the way of the people, and sprints to beat his fellow home in an impromptu foot race. My spirit soars after them, and I luxuriate in the warm embrace of memories from happier times.

I settle in for another evening of waiting. Within the cloth is a sheaf of bannock sliced into strips, and nestled below the fry bread lies a jar glowing sanguine in the dying light of day. Sweat drips from my brow as the lid pops with the urging of clumsy fingers. A galaxy of raspberry seeds hang in sweet suspension within the jam’s carmine sky, and the bannock gathers their gleaming beauty across its spongy surface.

It tastes of carefree weekends and walks to the playground when we stopped at the wild canes along the way, eating to satisfaction and bringing enough home to share. It tastes of stolen moments with my wife before the highway took the will from her, and carefree days with my mother long before that.

Replacing the lid when it’s only half empty is a heroic effort, and not just due to my fumbling hands. Better to save some for Bobby, God help him. The thready insistence of my pulse reverberates through me as I gather a blanket around my shoulders in the humid haze of twilight, shivering and sweating despite my jacket.

The crickets tune their instruments in preparation for their nightly symphony as I lay the food parcel across the opposing barstool and look to the road. My polluted blood runs cold when I see her.

The same orange jacket and fur hat from my memory loop, as if she had only disappeared this morning. She stands with the knock-kneed stance she always had, waiting for me on the highway; the genuine lost article of love.

She will be gone by the time I’m down the ladder—the thought spikes panic through my failing system, and my heart trembles. My arms ache with the need to hold her, burning in their emptiness. My head pounds with the force of a thunderstorm. She will be gone by the time I’m out of the container. There must be no hope in my soul; I cannot survive it.

But no, she’s waiting still; patient as my senseless hands fumble with the gate. My legs fail at the asphalt threshold, and she runs into my arms. Her frail body returns to mine, her heartbeat lost among the frenzy of my own—completing me profoundly. “My girl, my girl,” my throat keens a dirge, but I don’t hear it. There is only her.

“Come Papa,” she helps me to my feet and I melt into her eyes. The highway glows golden as we walk into the sunset, and the darkness of the road fades behind. “The wait is over.”

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Here is the story of the inciting incident!

“Looks alright.”

My partner doesn’t say anything; she doesn’t have to. Her knuckles are white on the reins as she fixes me with wide eyes framed by thick glasses. It’s rare that someone looks exactly like you would expect, but the young woman announces her former profession with everything from her hair in its no-nonsense bun to her pigeon-toed feet dangling above the stirrups. Even her red wool coat shouts librarian, standing like a rose against the camouflage and weathered workwear sported by the rest of us cow-punchers.

“Relax. It’s your first time out, that’s all. Things aren’t as bad as you’re imagining.” She nods but doesn’t believe me. Who am I to say? Someone who reads books all day might be imaging shit I can’t even envision.

My clucking tongue urges the horses onwards, steel-shod hooves raise a clatter over asphalt as the other two party members follow. Both of the scavengers have been tested against the horrors of the last few months, dependable in a tight spot; unlike this little bookworm. She surprised me not only with her idea for this outing, but her insistence upon accompanying us—which is why I gave her the chance to prove herself.

Bare soil shows in the fields alongside the road on tire-rut ridges like bones emerging from rotting flesh. The melt accumulates in deceptive channels ready to swallow legs and hooves if given the chance. Untold miles of sagging barbed wire encircle the quagmires, broken in places where starving cattle pushed through; leaving a trail of frozen hides and scattered bones to mark their passing.

We pass an obsolescent town sign with a long French name, halting on the outskirts to plan our next step. Nothing moves down the main street, but this ain’t my first rodeo. “Give ‘em a holler Brad.”

Cupping his hands around his mouth, his oversized voice calls long and loud towards the sparse collection of houses. We wait short minutes while he continues until the first inevitable corpse shambles into view. Others join, coming along slowly with cold-stiffened limbs.

The deep winter freeze gave us survivors a break from the undead—I even figured that when those corpses froze solid, that was the end of them. How could flesh withstand the freeze and thaw? Spring betrayed the truth of it.

“All yours, bud.” Brad and his partner watch the fields and tree-lines behind us for any surprises as five of the town residents stagger down the road in various states of dress; none of which would have kept the chill from a beating heart.

Gauging the distance and their glacial speed: I motion to Jane. “Might as well give ‘em a try with that rifle.”

Wide, magnified eyes blink until she jerks her head in realization and slides the deer gun from its mildewed leather scabbard. We had trained her as well as we were able back home with snap-cap cartridges to help her understand the mechanics of the weapon. We had even given her five live-rounds to get a feel for it; but there was hardly an abundance of ammunition these days… or anything else useful for that matter. She raises the weathered wooden stock to her shoulder, lowering it again as her horse bobs its head unexpectedly.

“Gonna be harder to shoot from the saddle. Try it on the ground.” I reach out for her reins as she hesitates. “Don’t worry, I won’t let ‘em get too close.”

She fumbles with the rifle as she tries to swing her short legs over the saddle horn, unsure of how to dismount holding the gun and inadvertently pointing it in my face. I ease it from her grasp by the barrel, allowing her to anchor herself on the aged tack with her hands and drop down to the road.

“Don’t rush and remember to breathe; it’s all good.”

She takes up the weapon and stands in front of us, inward-slanted feet planted firmly, narrow shoulders hunching around her ears as she aims at the leader; an old woman in a tattered nightdress dragging a foot along by shreds of necrotic flesh as a jagged tip of tibia scores the dusting of snow behind her. Two power-line poles away now, a hundred metres. The horses stir at her approach, I hold them fast; coaching Jane through the shot. Her finger eases the trigger, and she flinches at the report.

Couldn’t see where the bullet went, but it didn’t go into a geriatric skull. She sights again. “Cock it.” She blushes and cycles the action before the next round rips into the wrinkled face below the cheekbone—the mushrooming projectile fails to find grey matter. Inky, viscous tears dribble down from the neat hole to her quivering chin. Jane steps back as the old woman groans, reaching for her from one pole away; fifty metres. “It’s okay. You’ve got plenty of time. Focus on the breath.”

This time ‘baba’ collapses as if a light-switch to her body were flicked. Clotted black blood oozes onto the road like tar, blending in with the asphalt. “Good job. You’re a badass now, look at that. Mount up, I’ll take care of the others.” She flashes a nervous smile as I pass her the reins and spur forward.

“Ready.” I warn. Flickering ears point forward as my horse lowers her head—my hunting mount for years before the sickness, and no stranger to my ways. Four shots paced as if by metronome as my body aims, fires, and cycles the lever-action independent of thought. I clear the way into town.

Every house is beaten, front doors kicked in or windows shattered; unsurprising given the desperate circumstances over the last winter as survivors scavenged for supplies or fought the living and the dead alike for dominance of their homes. We aren’t here for food though, so we push on towards a two-storey, brick-sided manor at the dead heart of town.

“That’s it eh?” Jane nods. Small movement further down the street; a crow or a feral dog maybe. My binoculars bring forth neglected dwellings, undisturbed snow, and a curtain fluttering with the wind in a glassless kitchen window. No sign of the dead.

Our security detail waits with the horses in a cedar-hedged park across the street while we approach the antique building. The steel of the back door glints where pry-bars have scraped away the paint, freeing it from the frame. “Hey! Anybody here?” We listen to the wind moaning, the rhythmic tapping of something inside rising and falling with the gusts.

The scent of earth and old carpet fills the air of the stairwell as dried leaves rustle and dance in a desiccation vortex. A yellowed paper sign on the wall shows downstairs to the hair-dresser, right for the museum and second floor for the library. Stairs creak as we make our way up; the stink of burnt plastic filtering in. Jane waits as I survey a wide room cramped with steel shelves. The cold remains of a fire lie in a brightly-painted corner of the children’s section. Discarded food wrappers whisper across the floor as the wind picks up, knocking an interior door against the wall.

“Come on in.”

Jane’s face lights up as she enters. “This is better than I hoped for. Practically untouched.” She runs her hand along a row of paperback spines.

“Grab whatever’s important and let’s get going.” Into my bag go titles such as ‘The Homestead Gardener’, ‘Raising Chickens’, and ‘Renewable Energy for Dummies’. I even grab a handful of kids books for the few we have back at home.

The librarian shifts around the shelves, confidently pulling titles loose and placing them in her backpack. The town is still quiet through the window, and I shake off the feeling of eyes upon me. “The good shit’s over here, what’re you grabbing?”

“Just the essentials.”

Wrappers crinkle under my boots. “Steinback? ‘East of Eden’? What good is that gonna do us?”

“It’s Steinbeck, actually, and if I had a copy of ‘Mice and Men’, I’d show you, Lennie.”

“Well as long as we’re doing some light reading, why don’t you grab ‘World War Z’, or ‘The Zombie Survival Guide’?” I ask, holding the paperbacks from the science fiction section. Leafing through the guide, it’s clear that the novelty book would best serve as kindling.

“Actually that’s not a terrible idea.” She stows a copy of ‘I am Legend’ in her bag. “But we have to do more than just survive. We have to thrive. We’re lucky no one came in and burned these yet; every one of these books contains the life and experience of our greatest thinkers.”

I flip through the pages of ‘Confessions of a Shopaholic’ and arc my eyebrows at her.

“Well… some of them anyways.”

We leave the same way we came, pausing at the battered steel door to check the road. The cedars surrounding the park wave with the breeze between us and the others. A vague sense of dread settles over me as Jane steps into the road—I dash forward, hauling her back by her coat as a bullet snaps through the air in front of us.

The sharp crack of the shot reverberates around the houses, obscuring its origin; but definitely coming from the opposite side of where we entered town. We scrabble back to the cover of the doorway. “Brad! Brad!” My eyes flick from window to window in the surrounding buildings, my rifle follows. Shitfire. We hadn’t planned on having issues with the living.

Brad’s disembodied voice calls through the trees. “Whatchu wanna do?”

I want to fuck off, but without catching a bullet in the back. My breath is ragged; my hands shake from adrenaline. Adrenaline—right. “Hit ‘em on my call, we come to you.” I lick my lips and peer around the corner of the library—multiple broken houses, the shattered facade of the bank and—muzzle flash.

I shrink back as disturbed air slaps my face. “The garage, he’s in the fucking garage!” Jane stares at me. “Get ready to run, go through the trees and get the fuck down.” There is no comprehension on her pale face. “Hey! Snap out of it. You’ll be fine, just listen to me.” She clings to the bannister and nods, wide-eyed.

“Light ‘em up!”

Brad and his partner fire as fast as they can at the dilapidated building. I shoot twice towards where the flash was before grabbing Jane by the sleeve and dragging her after me. Another projectile snaps down the road towards us from the next house over—we tumble down beyond the cedars. “There’s two of ‘em!”

If we mount up and gallop down the road they have a shot at us for hundreds of metres, and Jane’s like to fall off the second the horses start running—so damn short she can’t even reach the stirrups.

We crawl through muddy snow to where Brad lies prone in the tree-line, evergreen leaves fluttering down around us as bullets shred branches. We have to go now, before they hit one of the horses. “Jane, start firing when we move. Stay down and stay here.” Fear in her eyes… but excitement too. Maybe she is a badass.

“I’m going for the house, you guys take the garage.”

Brad grimaces and nods. This is going to be fucked.

“Come on boys!”

The three of us break from cover and rush up the gentle slope towards the street. Running in slow motion, boots slide on wet grass and slush. Movement in the garage—the chilling leer of lustful rifle sights as my body outruns my feet, sending me tumbling to the saturated soil. This is it.

A bullet rustles my hair with its passage as I scrabble over greasy earth and the last metres to the plastic-sided wall. Another shot, this time from the house window to my left where a curtain whips against the breeze. My chest heaves with gulping breaths, the rifle is slick with mud as it nestles in my shoulder. My boot shatters the door-jamb, but I pause before entering—sure enough two neat holes appear in the centre of the wood.

The kitchen is strewn with the cast-off leavings of scavengers, cupboards lie open; obscuring my sight-lines. A shadow moves in the murky light of the living room and my ears ring from the report of my weapon. The metronome clicks and burnt brass tumbles to the dirty floor. Pained groaning, shoes kicking out over hardwood strips.

My rifle leads me into the next room, covering the writhing shape of a middle-aged woman bleeding out on the floor. Her gun lies forgotten on the ground as she moans; clutching a gut-wound and pedalling her feet weakly. “Ppplease! Wait—“ The metronome clicks again and her head snaps back.

“Hey! You good?” Brad shouts from outside.

Copper and gun smoke sting my nostrils as the spreading crimson tide laps against my boots. “Yeah. Coming out.”

Frigid air chills where my clothes cling to sweat as I emerge carrying what could be salvaged from the shooter. Brad grins, holding a fine hunting rifle recovered from the garage. He inclines his head towards the cedars. “Jane nabbed this guy on our way in. Only right she should get this.”

“Hell yeah man.”

I call to her as we walk towards the trees, my ears still ringing from the battle. My heart drops as she comes into view, lying limp below the brush. I roll her by the coat, exposing a ragged gash streaking across the side of her neck where a bullet found her. My hands come away sticky with blood and I fight a wave of nausea as I clean them with handfuls of snow.

The others are quiet as I ease the backpack from her frail shoulders. Wide, unfocused eyes behold me and my lies behind glasses knocked askew from her death-throes. She’ll turn, even without being bit. I can’t stand the thought of her damned to wander endlessly hungry. “I’m sorry.” The metronome clicks.

People are somber at home, they always are when we return fewer than we left. There is no blame; we who remain know the risks of our new world. That doesn’t ease the guilt of my failure.

Sleep eludes me as wide eyes stare in the darkness. I light a candle and pull a book at random from her blood-stained backpack. What in here was worth dying for? Sitting in bed, I search for Jane’s meaning. The words of a man long-dead speak to me from the page; profound and deep as the ocean.

“Call me Ishmael.”

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The following link is the short story of the initial attack that collapses society, creating the ‘Afterwards’ timeline.

David jogged across the intersection to beat the light, cradling a pair of loaded cardboard coffee trays (a hundred per cent post-consumer recycled, of course) and splattering frigid, ankle-deep slush up the legs of his grey wool trousers with every step. The liquid snow lay as thick in the street as horse shit in Jolly Old London before they stopped riding animals and started killing the planet with cars like the ones guzzling fossil fuels and belching out carcinogens in the congested street around him.

His Blundstone boots squelched over a sidewalk thick with vagrants and druggies warming themselves over the sidewalk exhaust vents of the hockey stadium, or squatting at the entrances of a myriad of under-the-road foot-tunnels built to make Winnipeg traversable for pedestrian traffic in brutal prairie winters. Few honest citizens dared to cut through the piss-reeking galleries and abandoned storefronts lining the lowway at night in recent years; preferring instead to brave the blistering wind of the world above.

“Hey uncle, can I get a double-double?” asked an enterprising addict.

David ignored the slurred request, striding between obstructing clusters of catatonic opioid enthusiasts where he could find gaps in the crowd, balancing the coffee trays in one hand and shielding them with the other. He stepped over a puddle of nostril-stinging vomit as he passed a stream of Jets fans shivering in their jerseys on their way back to warm pubs and cold beers. Better make it quick, it’s last call for the world.

The filter masks and dainty mouth-lingerie worn by many in the street were useless against the bio-weapon, of course. Not that anyone around him suspected the impending attack, or that they’d been unwittingly harbouring the weapon for months now; infecting everyone in their lives while their bodies fought low-grade sniffles. The symptoms had been calibrated to escape the attention of global health authorities, and The Group’s data indicated that there were virtually none alive that had escaped its reach. There had been whispers of a spike in investigative activity from the World Health Organization, and several colleagues’ arrests reported over the last few weeks—but it was already too late.

A pair of police officers stood on the next corner, laughing to each other and ignoring the lawlessness around them as they waited for… what? David sneered at the embodiment of organized apathy as he passed, and swiped his keycard through the reader guarding the airlock between the rude outside world and the pristine environs of the luxury apartment building. He handed one layer of coffee to the two-person security shift monitoring the lobby, trusting them to pass along the surplus drinks to their fellows who would no doubt be skipping their sleep cycle to witness the event.

The Group owned the building, occupied now only by the members of his two teams in their separate suites. Closed for renovations, he’d told aspiring tenants when they’d come asking. It would have been hard to explain the stockpiling of dozens of bulky plastic hard cases and solar generators in recent months to other residents.

He tapped out a rhythmic knock with his boot against the bottom of the command room door and stepped in as it opened for him. “These are already fuckin’ cold, get them in the microwave would you? I don’t want my last Starb’s to suck.”

Julie, dressed in a tie-dyed romper layered in colourful scarves, took the tray and hustled it to the kitchenette, stepping around a pile of black duffel bags on the carpet as she went. A bundle of thick dreadlocks perched on her shoulder like the tail of a tame iguana resting on her head—an outrageous affectation that the man knew best to never mention. “Ten minutes to go. I thought you weren’t going to make it,” she said, keying the appliance.

“Like I’d miss this.”

Raj, younger than David and Julie by a decade, and dressed to blend in at an indie rock concert, joined him at the faux-wood desk before an array of computer screens showing scenes from outside.

Addicts stumbled aimlessly in the blue-tinged world; others stood in contortionist poses like hellish statues draped in cast-off clothing and plastic bags. The downtown streets were clearing of the night’s post-game traffic, leaving the urban wildlife to its own devices—smoking cigarettes and huddling in rags apparently. David checked the cameras for the police from earlier, but they had disappeared already. Sure enough, the most enterprising prostitutes started to appear as if by magic on street corners.

Julie passed him his coffee, spreading warmth into his numb hands. David raised his cup in a toast, “For the past. For the future. For the world.” The others echoed his last and drank, watching the timer tick down through the last minutes of post-industrial civilization.

Raj shifted in his seat and rubbed his hands together absently, “I wish they would have let GAIA trigger it.”

“It wouldn’t be right. Humanity got us to this point, it’s only fair that we’re the ones to fix it.” David nodded at the screen, “They had their chance, look at what they did with it. No matter the warning, no matter the cost, they wouldn’t turn from their path. It didn’t have to go this way, but that’s what they chose.” He sipped his drink and met Raj’s soft, sheltered eyes: “Plus they burned the coffee. Fuck ‘em.”

The clock counted down the final seconds in silence. David flipped open a leather briefcase, revealing an interior glowing with the light of red LED bulbs, and retrieved a key from a necklace beneath his shirt. The others watched as his hand hovered over the single recessed slot on a smooth metal box within.

This isn’t right. I can’t fucking do this.

Laura’s face flashed before his eyes—the beautiful girl she had been before cancer had stolen the light from his world. He felt her frail, newborn warmth against his chest once more as he held her in his mind. The glow sparked a conflagration of hatred in his heart as his thoughts turned to the corporations poisoning the very air his family breathed; and the corrupt government agencies colluding with them. Everybody had a reason for joining The Group. His had driven him to this moment.

This has to end.

Digital numbers fell to zero on the monitor, and the interior lights switched to green as the key slid home, then flickered as David turned the fob. The LED’s flashed three times, and cut out. He released his held breath and leaned back in his chair. Julie gripped his shoulder, whispering again and again, “Thank you.”

Raj stared at the screens, “That’s it then? When does it start?”

“It’s already happening. Everywhere.” David cleared his throat against a lump of emotion, pushing it down to the deep place within his soul to lie with other sorrows. It had been necessary… right?

“Everything The Group fought for… it’s here and it can’t be stopped. The cell towers they all rely on… used against them.”

“And you’re sure we’re immune… right?” asked Raj.

David shrugged and sipped his coffee. “I guess we’ll find out.”

The screen array showed the first casualties within the hour as the weakest of the homeless began to exhibit symptoms—uncontrollable vomiting and diarrhea in the open streets, seeming to spread from victim to victim like prairie-fire as others succumbed to the bio-weapon; active now from the signal radiating from every compromised cellular node and hacked satellite The Group could influence.

A frenzy of sirens wailed outside. David rose from the desk to watch the street below through the plate-glass window. An ambulance sped downtown, avoiding prostrate clumps of dying humanity by skidding onto the sidewalk and sliding into a bollard. The driver stumbled out of the cab and collapsed to his knees to hurl his supper into the slush before resting his convulsing body against the curb. A rear door swung open, and his partner tumbled to the ground, her chest heaving as she fought for breath.

The strongest victims crawled towards the ambulance, dragging their bodies towards the false hope of rescue by inches as they retched and shat in the frigid air. One made it all the way over, but lacked the strength to haul himself into the cab of the idling vehicle as the others abandoned the effort and writhed in the street until one by one they ceased in their movements.

David stood fixed at the window for long hours until the power cut out, snuffing blinking warning lights on rooftops across the city and extinguishing rectangles of illumination in the surrounding high-rises. His cellphone couldn’t find a network, and hadn’t even sounded an emergency alert the entire night—evidence of the efficacy of GAIA’s cyber strike. The equipment in the room remained powered on, of course. The Group had spared no expense in provisioning their outposts and isolating their own grid from the city.

“That’s it, then. The sabotage teams did their work with the power-lines… Manitoba Hydro isn’t going to be repairing dozens of towers any time soon.” The man closed the blackout curtains and crossed to the farthest bed. He sat heavily, facing the wall, “Maintain radio silence, wake me if something happens.” He lay down on atop the comforter, turning away from the room to hide his face. It’s over… Laura… what have I done?

“I wonder what the actual… death toll will be, you know?” asked Raj.

Too many, idiot. Don’t worry, you’ll get the chance to see their faces every night for the rest of your life.

David heard the shrug in Julie’s answer, “GAIA knows what she’s doing, and thanks to all those mandatory health checks, she has the full database of The Group’s biometrics. The important thing is all the right people will have avoided it—who knew volunteering to save the planet would pay off, right?”

Raj exhaled and stared at the screen, “Yeah, no shit eh?”

* * *

David must have slept, for hands shook him awake. He focused on the words—a thrill of fear made him alert.

“We have a problem.”

He took the chair before the monitors and clicked through the camera feeds, “When did this start?”

Raj rubbed his hands together as sweat beaded at his temples, “Twenty minutes ago. At first I thought it was just one or two survivors… I didn’t want to wake you…but…”

The homeless were up again, as if nothing had ever happened. Scores stood hunched in catatonic postures like before, while others ambled down the sidewalk past prostrate, snow-covered bodies in the gathering darkness of sunset. David leaned back in his chair. What the fuck? Had it all just been a nightmare?

But no, there was the ambulance; missing its crew now. The lights were still off across the city, the streets empty of their customary stream of cars. He motioned to Julie on the other bed, “Wake her up and grab the security team—we’re going down to have a closer look.”

The six members of the group assembled in the lobby within twenty minutes, dressed in anonymizing biological protection suits and armed with prohibited weapons pulled from duffels upstairs. The power was kept off to the ground level to avoid compromising the outpost, and their footsteps echoed in the dark atrium.

Why didn’t I stay with the main team on the outskirts? Why the fuck did I have to volunteer for the city?

There were only two other observations posts for the whole of Winnipeg, and the teams hadn’t counted on having to interact with the outside world so soon after the attack—but whatever the hell was happening outside, it was worth a closer look than what windows and screens provided.

David keyed his radio, speaking to Julie upstairs, “Command, this is ground team; we’re stepping out, over.” He acknowledged her answer and nodded to the masked face closest to the door. The point-person, whoever it was under all that ridiculous gear, pushed out into the street in a decidedly civilian fashion.

David’s sigh hissed through the gas mask’s speech amplifier, and he followed the rest of the team into a cold that seeped through the latex against his face with the first gusts of wind funnelled through the channels between tall downtown buildings, covering the noise of the door closing behind them. He had no illusions regarding the skill of his ‘security’ team. Ultra-environmentalists were seldom born soldiers after all; but they had been included as a precaution against hostile survivors and given a basic level of training with their weapons at least.

A vagrant draped in cheap, filthy blankets, eyed them from up the street and stumbled towards the team. His vomited-flecked beard framed a moaning, sagging mouth. He stumbled forwards—gaining a shuffling momentum as some of his compatriots turned towards the noise. The druggie dropped to all fours like a beast for a few steps, then rose, snarling and twitching; glancing off a parked car as he closed the distance.

David stepped past the bio-suited group and called out, “Hey bud, are you alright?” A raspy, narcotic growl sent a shiver down his spine. “Do it,” he said to the figure behind him.

The leading team member levelled a dart gun at the shambling form, letting the red dot of the aiming laser play around the swaying neck before air hissed and a metal syringe appeared there. “Again!” called David as the bum rushed forward.

Two gleaming darts at his throat didn’t slow him, and he tumbled into the shooter at full shamble—knocking them both to the slush. The addict loosed a shuddering gasp of inhalation as he struggled with his prey, oblivious to the flurry of surgical gloves and rifle butts raining down on him. He grabbed his victim’s arm as they fought, thrusting his jaw towards the hand.

A distorted screech rumbled through the gas mask—blood spurted from three missing fingers onto the crazed face of the assailant as two team members hauled him back over the sidewalk by his legs. The attacker flailed free of their grip and scrabbled back towards his target where she lay staring at the nubs in shock. She shrieked and kicked out, giving the addict her boot to use as a handhold to haul himself closer and sink his teeth into the polymer leg of the suit.

“Shit.” David pointed his rifle and pulled the trigger, then flipped the safety off and tried again—nothing. The suited form on the ground squealed as the snarling assailant savaged enough material away to find her flesh underneath. David pulled the cocking handle and fired into the ground, surprising himself with the discharge of the once-familiar weapon.

Stop fucking panicking.

His ears rang as he aimed and squeezed the trigger, the rifle’s automatic action punched a series of small holes through the back of the unheeding addict and into the car behind him. “Fuck.” He stepped closer, until the muzzle was inches from the thrashing head of his target. The skull shattered with the impact of two bullets, spraying viscous black fluid onto the sidewalk. The attacker’s body slackened, and he was pulled away. “Shit.”

David looked up from the woman whimpering in her bloodied suit to the crowd of snarling druggies surrounding them, moaning and growling as they stumbled closer with twitching limbs—then to the safe-house door less than a hundred metres away. “Grab her, let’s fucking go!”

Two members of the security team lifted the casualty under her shoulders and dragged her over the sidewalk, leaving a trail of bright blood over the layer of dirtied ice and snow behind them. The others fled to the door, crowding it as David struggled with the card-reader. The plastic swiped impotently through the slot, failing to unlock the mechanism.

“The lights are off—the fucking thing needs power!” David pressed his back against the tall windows separating them from the lobby and keyed his radio, calling frantically for Julie in the command room to let them in. Sudden warmth spread down his legs as a ragged fusillade of gunshots split the air. A dozen frenzied homeless closed in, unheeding of the projectiles punching ragged channels through their bodies.

One hooded attacker collapsed as a lucky bullet snapped through her cranium. “Shoot them in the head!” a suited figure shouted before he was tackled to the ground from behind. One of the team turned their rifle towards the lobby and fired until the glass shattered, but disappeared under a dog-pile of flailing bodies before they could escape.

David fled the bestial faces swarming him, abandoning screaming teammates struggling with the rabid mob as he slipped over shards of shattered door. He shook off grasping hands and ran through the unlit atrium, slowing on the stairway only to rip the suffocating gas mask from his face. Tortured shrieks and sickeningly wet sounds of tearing flesh pursued him, echoing hauntingly around the concrete enclosure over his rapid breathing.

He pounded on the command room door with his boot, and pushed in as it opened; slamming it behind him and sliding down to the ground to catch his wind. He ignored Julie’s shrill questions and tried to swallow as he panted on the floor. His eyes met hers, wide with fear behind her thick, retro frames.

“Get on the radio with base… We’ve got a fucking problem.”

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This link connects to the next standalone short story wherein a group of survivors attempt to visit a library in the next town.

If you liked this story, be sure to check out the other standalone tales in the Afterwards zombie-verse! Likes, comments and re-posts are greatly appreciated.

The airplane squatted on flat tires in its ramshackle hangar; oxidized tin lining a frame of bare timber posts drawn from the forest by a team of horses in days gone by, when such things still happened. It was younger than the west-facing shack, but only just; having been knocked together by French engineers in prosperous post-war years to serve as a mechanical workhorse itself.

Its youth passed with the seasons, carrying supplies to isolated northern communities congealing about the Pacific coast; travelling the rivers and estuaries in the wilderness of the Canadian north like a blood cell to the furthest capillaries. It had been old when The Company sold it at auction to a hunting guide, but still sound, and game for terrible winters when it was hailed for food, fuel, and life-saving medicine.

Self-interest had made its various operators attentive to its needs, and whenever parts wore down or tears appeared on its yellow-painted canvas, the work had been attended to. Its engine had been swapped twice like transplanted hearts, and cataract-clouded windshields revived with artificial new lenses, but endless canvas skin grafts and a gaudy new metal propeller could never hide the proud skeleton of the airplane as it had been laid down.

It was the radio, however, that was the soul of the craft.

As much as the plane accepted the role it had been created for, and as content in its service as it was, there was no denying the lonesome nature of the work. It was the voices on the radio that made the endless struggle against time and nature bearable, the feeling of belonging as a thread on a wider tapestry stretching far beyond the horizon. There were few better able to appreciate the value of an elevated perspective, and the plane allowed for a broader connectivity to which it was entwined with the world during ponderous months of rest on wind-polished ice.

The song on the airwaves grew over long decades as more voices joined. Settlements widened and defined themselves over time, but the tune had been consistent with familiar verses and unforgettable rounds of chorus… until last winter.

The music changed abruptly, becoming panicked and desperate with feral voices, dwindling in number. The airplane had begun to believe that it was truly alone as static dominated the air during the normally lively spring thaw and no pilot came to operate it.

The guide never left his cabin to purge dirty mechanical blood and tighten loosened bolts, not even as vegetation browned and brittled with the next winter’s first whisper. The airplane accepted eternity gracefully, not resenting the deprivation of final proud years of service and dignity; and prepared to fade away—until the day a raft sailed into the cove.

Crudely-hewn timber platformed a thin mast bowing under the strain of a billowing poly sail as the ungainly vessel bucked in choppy waters. The airplane wished the craft well, and watched as the wretched figure of a man tumbled to the rocky shore. Sharp tombstones shaved splinters from the bobbing hull until the craft hove-over with the rising insistence of a falling barometer, and stood fast on the land upside down.

The man dragged himself by inches down the beach towards the guide’s shack, disappearing within and reappearing to pull an emaciated corpse into the cool air some time later. The door stayed shut for days afterwards, but a faint glow in the windows gave the airplane cause for hope.

The man came down to inspect the hangar once before the first snows came to blanket the land, a rough, rugged composite of all that came before: self-reliant, capable and determined. He seemed satisfied at their meeting and the plane dared to dream of one last flight.

The aircraft saw the man on occasion through the winter, searching always for something or another in the untidy assortment of cast-off machinery and appliances filling creaking outbuildings. Some days he fished the cove, traversing the jagged sheets of abstract waves radiating winter’s twilight in frozen prisms; other days the man sang into the static, voicing the airplane’s own wordless isolation.

The spring came as it always did—slowly, and then all at once. The sculpted landscape shattered in growing days, and the cove roared again with crashing surf. The song on the radio was faint now, feedback and eerie echoes in the ringing silence.

But the man seemed to have a plan.

The airplane was thrilled with the rejuvenation of oil dialysis, and the satisfaction of out-of-reach itches finally scratched as seized parts were freed. Weeks passed before the man seemed content with the servicing, and thick skeins of numberless geese chorused motivation in the skies during their great return migration.

The day finally came when the man started the engine, laughing and whooping after it roared into motion following several hours of muttering and tinkering. By the next sunset, the plane was strapped with spare jerry cans of fuel, and two small duffels had found a place in the spartan cabin on the co-pilot’s ragged seat. The man passed the final night by the cove singing his lonesome tune to an indifferent ocean of airwaves broken by echoing static surf.

They were airborne to meet the dawn, and the man set their course confidently south—running them parallel with, and above the waterfowl rising to carry on with their pilgrimage. Soft light illuminated a landscape of spring’s green blossom, touched here and there by fading fingers of snow; the topography broken everywhere with inland lakes glowing in a spectrum of gold and crimson. The airplane vibrated with the excitement of a fresh journey.

The plane didn’t know where it was going, but it knew where it had been untold times before; and the man kept them to a heading leading to a well-travelled station serving as a fuelling stop, so the old workhorse focused on the familiar two-step through the turbulence and enjoyed the ride. The silent airwaves wore on its spirit, but the craft remained hopeful as they closed the distance to the oasis.

The outpost was still as they circled, and no notes answered the inquiring man over the radio as they broke the inlets’s placid surface with aluminum skids. The engine spooled down while they drifted to a floating dock of milled timber stretching out over the water. The man steered them clear of a lone mast standing proud of the surface, hosting a dozen squabbling seagulls screaming dominance of the perch. The ship’s hull revealed itself as they passed, a hideous rotting yellow through the murky water, lurking in the shallows like a predator. The airplane’s oil pressure spiked as it waited for the inevitable attack; but none came, and they moored under the gulls’ endless cry.

The man walked out of sight somewhere among the cluster of cabins, hangars, and storehouses while the plane cooled under the wind’s frigid caress, shuddering in its aluminum bones at the emptiness of the place. A haunting feeling of greater loss elsewhere on the tapestry sent a tingle down its antenna, and the airplane desired to leave.

Echoes of sharp hammering reverberated around the sheltered bay, noticed absently by the plane only by virtue of being the only unnatural noise at all. It took a moment for the venerable craft to recognize the gunshots for what they were, as it had never heard so many so close together.

The dock trembled under the running footfalls of the man, and then he was dropping an armload of fuel canisters along the airplane’s battered aluminum float in a pitiful cluster.

The people of the outpost streamed towards the pilot as he cut the rope binding the aircraft in place, and bracing himself between the metal and the wood, he squatted down to press his back against the airframe. The dock swayed as the first of a score of residents stumbled onto the boards, bobbing on the calm water as more followed.

The aircraft could see now a terrible affliction among their kind that it had only ever witnessed in its mechanical peers: tattered skin hanging in ribbons, critical parts missing, and all manner of lubricants dripping from countless leaks. The man scrabbled to avoid the others, leaping over the growing gap of open water between them and the dock, and clinging to a strut whilst he caught his breath.

The crowd pressed on relentlessly—tumbling from the wood into the water without hesitation, to be dragged under the surface by the weight of their shredded clothing. Some bloated bodies floundered without going down—but none were able to make their way over to the float.

The man emptied the canisters into the tank as the afflicted milled about the beach; stumbling out of the lake aimlessly and then turning to walk straight back in when they noticed the craft as if for the first time. The airplane shifted as one of them managed to reach the aluminum skid from below, hauling itself up towards the man; but the pilot saw the danger and stove the intruder’s skull in with a wrench. A ragged moan rose from the strangers as they pursued the drifting floatplane, then gurgling as water filled lungs.

The airplane gauged the level of fuel sloshing in the tank and dreaded the next leg of their journey, if indeed they were going where it thought. Maybe an engine swap ago, or even the autumn prior. Now, with calcified veins, rusty valves and brittle bones? The man had done what he could to prepare the craft, but he couldn’t turn back the hands of time.

They sat together for a while, with the man in the cabin watching the beach, waiting maybe, for it to clear. The sand swarmed with the afflicted. No matter how many lost themselves in the inlet, enough would find their way out again.

The man dropped an anchor as the sun set to keep the breeze from carrying them out into deeper waters and stronger winds. He tried the radio a few times during the night between instances of fending off the odd rabid human that found their tenuous chain to the void below, but there was no reply. Dawn revealed the same circuitous movement of the crowd and the man wasted no more time there.

The fuel in the tank lasted them through the short day, gone seemingly in an instant to the airplane as a sickly lightheadedness settled over it. The man urged them ever higher with the controls as the craft flashed its warning lights to him. Higher, higher yet. The airplane fought for focus, straining itself in answer to the pilot’s commands.

The air was thin and cold. The old workhorse flared its intakes—desperate for the right mix of oxygen and fuel. High-pitched ringing filled the radio, fading as the airplane snuffled the last of the fuel from the tank. The engine pumped on bravely for several moments before it stalled, silencing its stuttering roar.

Wind screeched over tired wings as they glided onwards. The plane’s body chilled without its heartbeat, but it refused to accept defeat as long as it was airborne.

A note pierced the airwaves, heard by the aircraft as if from a great distance as it focused on maintaining the best attitude of its flaps. The man answered, and the airplane soared with hope. It focused its antenna, bringing the distant music onto the correct channel and orienting itself to the source; closer than the plane had first thought.

The man sang into the radio as he and the airplane fought gravity, each helping the other to adjust the trim of the craft as they fell through weeping clouds. The voice answered, louder and clearer every moment. The landscape reappeared, darkening with sunset’s deep shadows. A steel cable snapped, and the plane shuddered with the effort of catching enough air under its sagging wings.

The music insisted, calling to them from any of the hundred shrouded coves along the coast, but the airplane couldn’t pinpoint it. The man shouted as a lick of light burst into the sky below them, and he pedalled the rudder to shift their course.

They fell faster, stretching every foot on the altimeter. There would be no circling and landing against the wind this time—they would have only one run at it. Another flare launched skywards, now almost level with the plummeting craft.

The sun hesitated on the horizon, as if to witness the moment the airplane struck the waves.

The roiling surf was nothing like the sheltered bays the airplane had made a career of landing in, but it felt no fear as it was caught in the unrelenting arms of the ocean, and its aluminum floats were sheared away. The man struggled within the cabin, stunned perhaps by the crash, and the plane gauged the distance to the fading beach. The pilot would never make it.

The airplane surged its fuel system with every ounce of spirit it had left, spiking its oil pressure, and filling dry chambers with fresh blood. The engine spat seawater and roared fury into its bent propeller, raising the airplane’s nose free of the waves, and righting the craft in the battering surf.

The man cracked open his door with bloody hands and braced himself as the aircraft rushed towards the sand on the back of a crashing wave, managing to spill himself out of the cabin as the plane’s frame dragged along the bottom and the engine cut out.

The same wave pulled the craft back into the embrace of the next, knocking loose a wing and pushing the fuselage deeper. The man dragged himself out of the water as another rush bent the tail section free of the aircraft, floating away now that it was detached.

Air gurgled out of the fuselage like a death-rattle as the plane slipped below the surface, pushed and pulled by swirling currents for long minutes until it settled into its final resting place on the plush sea-floor sand.

All that remained of the airplane was the cabin, the still engine, and the radio; drowning as water forced itself into aged circuits. The old workhorse prided itself on its final effort, and eased into sleep as the mournful tune of a pod of whales vibrated down its antenna.

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The following link is the short story of the initial attack that collapses society, creating the ‘Afterwards’ timeline.

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It’s still quiet here, thank God.

I left El Paso as soon as I was well enough to stumble out of the hotel and into my rig. Three days of the worst flu I’d ever had, retching and worse in the dark room the last day after the power cut out— didn’t dare call the front desk out of shame and I was still well-supplied for a weekend of debauchery in the city so I never inquired about the outage.

The gunfire started the second night while I shivered and sweat through my blanket cocoon, not the usual skirmishing of the Cartels across the river either; this was in the streets outside, frequent and alarming. Moaning in the hallway, sirens warbling, drifting in and out of consciousness.

I didn’t know what I was stepping into, even left a cash tip on the nightstand for the mess before departing shamefully by way of the stairs without checking out at the desk— just wanting to get back to my trailer and call in sick for the next week.

A rapid string of gunshots echoed from somewhere near the parking lot and I hopped in the truck and locked the doors, intending to top up my quarter tank of gas on the edge of the city… until I saw the state of the roads downtown.

No traffic— a car parked straight through the wide gap where glass had once lined a storefront, glittering in the morning light from the sidewalk. I pulled my Colt revolver from its holster and reassured myself of its load after another rattle of rapid-firing weapons. This is Texas, in case y’all forgot.

My phone wasn’t working by then, still had battery but it wouldn’t pick up so much as the hotel wifi signal. The first car yet came speeding down the street, disappearing with the screeching of tires up the block.

That’s when I saw the bodies.

I might’ve thought they were just homeless people if they weren’t lying bloody on the asphalt. I eased the truck forward and tried my useless phone again, pressing on the brake pedal and trying not to throw-up on my dashboard.

A cement truck barrelled into sight, ricocheting off a line of parked cars before righting itself in the painted lanes while one of the bodies in front of my pickup moved. The gear selector went to park and my hand to the door lever, but I could only watch in horror as the cement truck thundered into the woman, the driver seeming to actually seek her out as she came to her knees.

The machine left a smear twenty feet long in its wake of what had once been a human being… culminating in a pile of glistening, writhing flesh.

That was the last straw for my stomach, and what little food I’d eaten in the room came rushing up as I opened the truck door too late, gasping and leaning my head against the steering wheel; wondering where the hell the cops were. When I looked up again, two of the wrecked corpses had come to their unsteady feet.

The one nearest to me looked dead in my eye, reaching out with shaky arms as he stumbled forward, his feet catching in the mess of intestines trailing from an ugly gash bisecting his torso. I slid the truck into drive and hammered on the pedal, going backwards instead— into a parked sedan.

The man tripped over his innards, fixing me with an uncomprehending stare from the pavement as I actually put the truck into drive this time and sped out of there.

Everything after that is flashes and I never did make it to the gas station.

Leaving my vehicle and the strobing horrors of the road behind me, I skirt the perimeter through dry fields and long lines of irrigation pivots, dormant in the Texan winter.

God what an unlikely town.

I needed time to cool off and regroup when Patricia got the house in the divorce, and there was a hefty bonus for taking the job to offset the isolation of the place that a newly-single man could drink away in El Paso, but hot damn.

There ain’t nothing but desert for hours in any direction, yet Dell city springs from the sand where farmers in the 50’s established irrigated agriculture on the thirsty landscape fed by massive underground aquifers. The round fields, shaped so because the water pipes pivot around the centre, look like blank canvasses for crop-circles when viewed from above, dotting the desert like some sort of NASA experiment on Mars.

I learned when I moved there to sell fertilizer and chemical that the place had been named for the nursery rhyme and the tune hasn’t been far from my mind since. The rhythm of my boots over packed soil punctuates the song.

The farmer in the dell

The farmer in the dell

Hi-ho, the derry-o

The farmer in the dell.

The power is off in my trailer, the air cold. The plastic door lock clicks impotently behind me, the vacant stare of the disemboweled man in El Paso flashes through my mind and I fish the shotgun out of the closet to banish the thrill of panic rippling down my spine. The rest of the day passes with me sitting in the unlit room fondling the gun, checking my useless phone, and peering out of the cheap curtains to the lifeless cluster of buildings and infrastructure that lied about being a city while my body recovers from the sudden sickness it had gone through.

I slip into a deep, cleansing sleep sometime after sunset and wake up with the dawn. My phone is a brick— not even an emergency alert, so I decide to check in with my landlord down the road.

The quad starts, but the gas tank is showing low and the spare jerry cans lay empty under the tin-roofed lean-to. It’s enough to get me to Ralph’s. He doesn’t hear my knock but that’s nothing new— I figure he’s old enough to have been here when they first tapped into the underground springs, but he might be out back.

A handful of horses in the dusty paddock whinny when they see me, fighting and stamping around the galvanized steel trough. I glance over at the back of the house, still in the quiet morning. Ralph would have never let his animals go thirsty.

The electric pump sits inert, but the rusted steel of the old tap swings freely, creaking under my urging and gushing streams of cool water into the dry basin. The horses settle down and snuffle at the liquid as the level rises painfully slowly, all the while I check over my shoulder every few pumps at the empty sliding glass door. My muscles burn and my head spins from the effort by the time the animals have satisfied themselves enough for me to fill it.

The hair on my neck rises and my hand goes to the grip of my holstered revolver as I turn towards the house.

Ralph presses his naked, blood-slicked body against the glass doors like a bikini car wash in hell. His puckered mouth drools frothy spit obscuring him as it spreads over the surface.

The handgun slides free at my side as my boots crunch over gravel until I’m standing at the porch face to face with him. Fixing me with the same dead eyes from El Paso, he flails at the glass with flaccid arms loose with flesh and shot through with varicose veins where I can make him out through the smeared layer of gore and saliva.

I may be a bumpkin from New Mexico, but I’ve seen a zombie movie or two in my day. Even then I would’ve let him be if the glass had held.

Instead he came stumbling out over shards as the door gave, gurgling like a throat-cut hog, causing me to back up and trip over the low deck.

“Ralph! You’d better fuck off!”

The revolver bucks twice and he tumbles to the gravel at my feet. My aim shakes as my hands tremble, but he doesn’t move again. Acrid gun-smoke stings my nostrils as black blood dribbles down his wrinkled scalp, following the channels in his skin like water from a cloudburst down a parched arroyo; the dried riverbeds scarifying the desert.

I collect myself and lean in for a closer look at the glistening fluid, much darker and tackier than was right, but the stench of it mixed with the film of excrement and blackened blood coating my landlord’s corpse makes me retch and I leave him and his house well-enough alone after that.

I take the quad home and check the fuel tank with a flashlight— empty. I’ll have to go down to the bulk station with a few jerries and bring the a.t.v back with my pickup.

I corral a few of the empty canisters and the shotgun and start towards the near edge of town two miles away. I’ve lived here a couple years but I had the whole layout memorized in a week and the fuel station is about the most prominent stop around, second only to the Napa cafe.

There are strangers at the station. I creep back behind the cover of the last house next to the compound, it’s obvious that it isn’t the local farmers chewing the dog over a cup of coffee.

A handful of vehicles ring the chain-link entryway of the compound, a mix of El Paso Police Department, State Patrol and a National Guard logistic truck. The dismounted occupants look like a cross between special forces operators and gutter pimps, masked in balaclavas and brandishing blinged-out assault rifles glinting in the morning sun.

They shout to each other in Mexican, waving on a growing line of traffic to the pumps. Some of the traffic disgorges new narcos who form into groups and begin patrolling down the nearest roads. Vans and cars empty of their contents, human and material under the watchful eyes of the armed men.

Shots split the air from further into town. Shouts from near the pumps as the bandits try to separate the men of a family from the women, more shooting and then screaming as bodies fall.

Shit.

Leaving the fuel cans behind, I jog along the field edges until I’m back at the trailer. Most of my outdoors gear is already together in bags, but I cram extra ammunition into zippered side-pockets and tie every plastic milk jug I find onto a hank of rope. More gunshots, faint through the thin walls of the trailer.

The Guadeloupe Mountain dominates the landscape seen through my eastern window, glowing red in the growing light of day. Straight across the gentler northern peak, across days of desert, is my brother’s ranch in Hope, New Mexico.

In the heat of summer, there would be no chance, but one man and a couple horses loaded with water in the winter? I’ll take my odds over the warlords that just took Dell City.

Ralph’s shop has more than enough tack needed to outfit two of my favourite horses from the paddock, known to me from weekend rides and hunting outings in better days. I secure a leather scabbard to the pack saddle and load the shotgun into it, securing it to the other horse and both get full jugs of water secured wherever convenience allows.

We depart after noon, leaving the paddock gate open behind us. The gang hasn’t bothered to come out this way yet, but I can hear the wailing of their work and see the smoke of their fires even from here.

The day is cool and the rush of breeze in my ears drowns out the cries behind me. A hawk circles overhead, uncaring of the calamities of humans. Hooves clop over the graded surface of the service road we follow while the song runs through my head.

The farmer in the Dell

The farmer in the Dell

Hi-ho, the derry-o

The farmer in the Dell.

The mountain rises before me, forming a jagged new horizon. The desert is calmer now in the chill of the year than the last time I had taken the horses this way, during rabbit hunting season.

We stop at the head of a trail descending into parched gullies. The last images of distant Dell City burn into my mind as if onto film— a conflagration consuming the western edge of town serves as the flash, dwarfing the minuscule shapes of people and vehicles fleeing the chaos.

A deep, basso rumbling finds me even in the creases of the ancient riverbed, the fuel compound exploding no doubt. Images of friends and people I’d known in town flood me and I sing to banish them, my quavering voice reverberates from the crumbling stone walls.

The farmer wants a wife

The farmer wants a wife

Hi-ho, the derry-o

The farmer wants a wife.

Except the farmer had a wife… once. The horses are uneasy as we push past the boundaries of our usual haunts. We find a green-tinged spring of water pooling in an arroyo dip so I rest the horses while the sun sets, igniting the pastel smears of sandy stone blending into the greys and beige of the bedrock of Guadalupe, sporting layers of dry shrubs, patches of squatting cacti and swathes of air-dried grasses wherever the tenacious plants found a crevice to cling to life in.

Following the roots of the summit on my right hand, we should emerge past the long slope in two or three days ride, another four or five to my brother’s maybe… if I’m lucky.

Our path the next morning follows a rise and I pause at the top of it to look behind. The worn stone of the alluvial landscape stretches to the horizon, the channels and gullies formed by ancient flow spread like blood vessels on a landscape avulsed of its skin in the red glow of dawn. Movement in the distance.

My binoculars bring a human figure into focus, shambling along a rocky trail half a day’s ride behind me. Another palsied man stumbles into sight as the first topples from the path into a hidden gully.

“What the hell?”

I cluck my tongue and urge the horses— there’s no way they can track us through the false roads, switchbacks and treacherous drops making up the way forwards.

The shrubs are thicker and gnarlier as we follow paths through the shoulder of the mountain, catching on clothing, hide and saddle as we navigate blocked paths and sudden cliffs.

A wind storm blows in the second night, cold and heavy with lingering precipitation that snuffs the warmth from my body as the eddying current carries it swirling over porous stone and desiccated vegetation. The two horses and I huddle through the night to beat the chill with no fire.

Fog obscures the way the next morning and I almost follow my mount over the edge of a cliff, barely kicking free of the stirrups as the animal tumbles screaming to shatter against jagged stones below.

My hands grasp the reins of the packhorse until they’re bleached white as I collect myself. The wet, ragged sound of ripping meat floats through the fog. My hands tremble as I sink to my knees and peer out over the precipice— a thick bank of gray obscures the poor animal, but it appears to be moving.

Fuck’s sake.

I line up the front post in between the rear iron sights of the revolver and try a couple shots into the dark mass— the sharp report echoes monumentally around the enclosing stone. A shadow moves, separating from the larger blob of darkness below and resolving into the figure of a man pawing at the sheer cliff. I shiver as his undead gaze transfixes me.

Another shot and he sprawls backwards beside the horse, their bodies merging again through the obscuring mist. Empty brass tinkles over rock as the spent cartridges vanish into the abyss.

We push on through the day with the wind tugging at my clothes, pushing the cold deeper into my body as the storm shrieks through gullies. Creosote shrubs gather moisture from the air in ponderous dewdrops clinging to branches, leaves and stems that wick to my legs as I brush past in the saddle, soaking me through to my hips.

The surviving horse is ill-tempered far from its home and trough, manifesting its poor attitude as stubbornness and once an opportunistic bite when I dismounted to pass water. The song runs through my head like a mantra.

The farmer in the Dell

The farmer in the Dell

He got so mad he beat his wife

Halfway down to Hell.

By the fourth day I’m feeling the symptoms of withdrawal from technology. There is no phone to drown out my thoughts and they intrude, harassing me with past sins long buried under an ocean of grain liquor and low company while the damn song runs through the interludes until I’d kill for a different tune. Shit, even Neil Young would do.

I tie the horse’s reins in fading light around a gnarled pine trunk twisting and pointing the way further down the trail and make my bed in a natural cubby recessed under an overhanging stone. I creep back to listen on the path after the horse is relieved of its tack and watered.

The storm is moving off, pulling the wind whistling with it and allowing the moon to illuminate the northern slope of the range, rolling down to the badlands stretching eternally between me and my brother’s ranch striped with arroyos black with void like veins carrying poisoned blood across the desert.

I pull the bulk of the saddle to cover the opening of the alcove before I dare try for some elusive sleep, rolling and shifting to find an ounce of comfort on the vampiric stone floor draining me of the last heat I had managed to husband through the storm.

I dream of Patricia and our last night together, a scene I haven’t endured for half a year or more. Her screams grate on my nerves, filling me with rage like only she had been able to do with her shrill voice ringing in the dark, rising and shrieking and—

The screaming splits the pre-dawn morning, piercing high above a low murmur of moaning, snarling and gurgling. The horse fights against the tied down halter, bucking and whinnying in terror as a handful of zombies grasp at her blood-stained hide in the gathering light.

My mind tells my hand to draw the revolver but I’m paralyzed as my mount tears the scraggly tree free of the wall and disappears down the trail until the sound of her hooves are lost to the gasping and grunting of the ten or so walking corpses following her. Bare feet and odd shoes scrape against stone as they shuffle down the path and I tremble until dawn arrives and breaks the spell of terror over me.

Easing the saddle away from the alcove and leading with the revolver, I step over drying splashes of vivid crimson on beige stone to check the way ahead; clear at the moment.

The saddlebags are left behind with what I can’t carry as my riding boots tap a tattoo over gritty sand where the final slope of the mountain meets the infinite beige horizon. Water jugs strung together by twine dangle over my chest like teats, suckled equally to maintain their balance as I lean into the trackless road with the shotgun over my shoulder.

The farmer wants a horse

The farmer wants a horse

Hi-ho, the derry-o

The farmer wants a horse.

Up over banks of ragged stone sharp enough to taste my blood and down slopes of shifting gravel loose enough to tumble me, every fold of the desert is identical to the last. Following the natural flow of the arroyos would only lead me further into the ancient wasteland but the relentless scrabbling over banks is exhausting. After shivering through another night in the open plain, I leave the shotgun with its heavy supply of ammunition on a flat stone like an altar offering to the desert and step off.

The unyielding boot leather takes a flesh toll from my feet with every step, and by noon I stop to remove them, upending the pair and letting the blood drain out onto thirsty sand while I wrap my tortured feet in strips of ripped flannel shirt. Stifling a groan, I slide my clubbed feet back into their holsters and turn to descend the next slope.

Movement in my peripherals gives me pause. Squinting across the landscape, I make out a handful of zombies cresting a rise far behind on my back-trail.

“No… fucking… way.”

I cast off my empty water teats before night falls, now only the compass and the revolver remain of my tools. Every step is torturous and I find a low bench of stones in failing light to rest on while my fingers count the stubby bullets nestled in leather hoops at my side. Five at my hip plus the five in the chambers… how many of them are there out there in the night, stumbling towards me even now?

The waning moon rises, bringing enough light to reveal the lunar landscape, empty even of the coyote’s cry. A tumbleweed startles me as it bounces out of the darkness on its perpetual journey towards disintegration. The bench holds me as I slide away for unknown minutes, waking and fighting treacherous eyelids until I convince myself I don’t care about living and they close again.

I feel the sensation of falling and jerk back to reality as the first of the undead emerge from the dark of the ancient riverbed into the moonlight. Blinking rapidly to focus his blurry face, I settle the gunsights on his head and ease the trigger until the grip bucks in my hand.

The middle-aged man topples, exposing the open musculature and skeleton of his back where the flesh has been eaten away. My thumb hauls the hammer back, rotating the chambers and settling a new bullet in line with the barrel as three more corpses shamble into the light, catching the last four loaded cartridges before they collapse to drain into the fine gravel.

Practised fingers rotate the cylinder and work the slide to eject the spent casings, replacing them with the final handful as a rich gurgling noise approaches through the darkness.

Willing life back into my legs, I rise to face the next wave. Muzzle flashes strobe to reveal primal expressions and splattering fluids as the gun empties and clatters from my grip to the ground. More materialize from the shadows and I gimp hard into the night, finding a tolerable rhythm while my ragged breathing dries my throat.

The farmer in the Dell

The farmer in the Dell

Hi-ho, the derry-o

The farmer in the Dell.

The wind picks up, carrying gritty sand and stifling dust to obscure the endless riverbeds webbing over the desert like a vivisection slice of a cancerous and necrotic brain, exposed to let the malignancy be studied by men of science and medicine.

I hide my face with my shirt and lean into the wind, buffeted by abrasive gusts as I stumble blind with the flow of the arroyo. The howl of air over stone fills my ears, desensitizing me to everything but the song.

I trip on an unseen rock, scraping myself on the ground as I catch myself with my hands coming away wet with muddy water. Scrabbling forward, my bleeding fingers probe the stone until they find a spring-fed pool no wider than a hoof-print, thick with dust and sand from the storm.

I lie down over the puddle and suck the moisture through my ragged shirt as a filter until I satiate my thirst. Grit collects around my shoulders in tidy heaps as I pant in the mud.

Something kicks my foot and I feel the weight of a body fall over my legs. I recoil in terror as a hand darts out of the swirling storm and takes hold of my jeans, bringing the bruised arm and shoulder of my assailant into being as it drags itself towards me.

I kick out at the snarling face with its dead eyes as it resolves growling from the sandstorm, catching my boot with its other hand and wrestling it from my foot. The denim tears and I scrabble lopsidedly over piercing gravel into the shrieking wind.

I leave the other boot behind when I can’t stand any more of the shock on my unprotected foot as it makes up the difference in height. The parched riverbed flows forever under the obscuring cover of stinging particles while I trudge on.

The wind dies, noticed only because the sun blinds me. The desert stretches forever, trackless under a fresh layer of nothing broken here and there by skeletal shrubs. My wasted feet move only inches at a time, leaving a snail trail through chalky beige powder.

The hair on my neck rises, but I don’t care to look behind anymore. Only the desert matters. Gurgling and moaning that can’t drown out the song. Shuffling feet and shifting sand, snapping teeth and retching coughing from a chorus of corpses congregating in my wake.

I can feel the foremost just behind… overtaking me…  moving on…

My feet lurch to a halt after a few more steps as the second follows the leader, crop dusting me with its death stench as it stumbles past. A dozen more stream by, but none come to embrace me.

The ragged, bleeding slabs of my feet plough through dust as I shuffle after them. All the while the song runs through my head.

The farmer in the Dell

The farmer in the Dell

He fucked around and found out now

He’s on his way to Hell.

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After-images of the meagre cook fire hamper me, dancing in my vision. Keeping the rifle steady, I pull the skillet from lapping tongues of blue alcohol flames and set it on the pavement beside the battered stove. A thick slice of bacon-imitating, mechanically-separated pork sizzles enticingly in its drippings, browned to perfection by practiced hands.

A basso gurgling drowns out the delicate sigh of rendering fat as my stomach wraps itself in knots. Hunger wins out; if it was a zombie it would have come already.

I lean the rifle across scuffed boot leather and cap the canister in the stove to extinguish it, salivating as wisps of steam embrace me. Warm food for the first time in days.

The meat is over-salty and crumbles on my tongue in the manner of canned food long past its best before date, dusty for years even prior to the collapse of society, dustier yet when it was found.

It is exquisite.

I choke as a shape creeps out of the encroaching shadow like a bead of water separating from a drop on a windshield in days gone by. The skillet clangs against the ground as I scrabble backwards, pointing the rifle at the… dog.

The mutt hesitates, hanging its shaggy head low. If it has a tail it is lost somewhere in the matted mess of fur and clinging mud as the wretched animal works up the courage to steal closer.

“Shit.”

I sit back down on the curb and take up my supper from the ground, collecting pieces of pork and bringing them to my lips like ticks to a grooming ape. Gristle or gravel crunches between my teeth as the forlorn figure whines at me.

“Fuck off.”

The headlamp is worth the risk to find the rest of my hamsteak against the curb. The dog’s eyes glow in the soft red light, menacing if the creature wasn’t so damn frail. I savour the last of the meat in the dark as it disintegrates into shreds in my mouth, sucking juices and sand from my fingers until I can taste only skin.

The mutt tries again with its keening, closing the last few feet between us. “Fuck off I told ya. You’re not getting shit.” Its nose glistens in the moonlight as it snuffles about the rifle on my boots, searching for overlooked flakes of food on the asphalt.

I rescue the empty spam can with its clinging smears of snotty white fat before the mongrel can discover it, to be melted and drizzled over a handful of oatmeal in the morning; not wasted on a dog.

I make my bed under an overpass, arranging the better part of my worldly possessions into their familiar configuration: the half-empty backpack is my pillow and the army-surplus blanket wraps around my clothes. The rubber poncho cocoons me down to the loosened boots that remain on my feet while the rifle never strays farther than arm’s reach.

A warm tongue grazes my folded hands over the poncho and the dog recoils as I shoo it. I tuck my arms under the rubber and roll to the other side, drawing the hood by its strings to pucker it over my face. The aches of my body fade as it begins the short slip into sleep.

A warm tongue flicks against my lips where they protrude through the drawn hood. “Fuck man.” The dog cringes back as I sputter and wipe my mouth with a handful of filthy blanket then darts forward to drool on the fabric of the backpack.

I pull back the hood and consider the thing that might once have been called a terrier. Even without the rifle, it would be a simple matter to kill it. Not a day goes by without something dying by my hand… or returning to death… or… who even gives a shit anymore?

Now there is only survival…yet…

Sitting up, I retrieve the can from the backpack and contemplate its contents before I bend the cheap metal out of shape, broadening the narrow opening. It rings hollow, tossed to the pavement.

I fix my bed and draw the hood again before lapsing into sleep to the sound of a lapping tongue and metal dragging over asphalt.

The dog curls between my boots as the sun rises. We shiver together in the frigid air of morning, robbed of our warmth in the night by the pavement below. The highway is silent as the routine is observed: The alcohol stove sparked into life by my fire-steel and the metal cup with three fingers of water set to boil over it while I stamp life back into numb feet and load my bedding into the backpack.

The dog watches me hopefully as I piss against the curb, what little stinking urine my dehydrated body can flush. With the light of dawn comes the headache it brings as the water roils inside the blackened steel cup. I dribble too much oatmeal out of a repurposed plastic tube that had once been full of pre-rolled joints from a marijuana dispensary, the cap of the container is hinged and fits snugly when not in use.

I smother the congealing oats with the metal lid of the cup and extinguish the stove. The dog sits between my boots and stares at me while my breakfast reconstitutes.

I force down the meal, dull without the spam fat, eating until my stomach reaches its customary satisfaction. A generous spoonful remains, along with the thick film coating the inside of the cup. I sigh and place it on the ground— the dog dives into the steaming container, sinking in up to its shoulders. The cup scrapes on the asphalt as the cooking gear is packed away.

The dog licks the metal bare, and then some before I retrieve it and stow it away. I’ll find a stream to wash it later.

We pass the morning along the highway, avoiding rest-stops and off-ramps leading into subdivisions sure to be swarming with the undead. The skeleton of the city looms in the distance, burnt high-rises jutting into the air like blackened ribs.

The road goes west, and that is where I am headed with a vague idea of one day reaching the sea. I don’t harbor notions of safety at the coast, but my late wife and I had dreamed of taking a trip along the pacific one day. I’ve never reconciled that with my interest in survival, but there is no-one now to confront me for my foibles.

The dog trails behind unacknowledged throughout the day, clinging to my shadow like a drowning man to flotsam. I pass handfuls of zombies on occasion, veterans of the first days of collapse— they stumble after me, shrinking behind as I walk on. Later I will double back and give the whole herd the slip before I set to fixing supper on the shoulders of the great dirty ribbon unspooling towards the sunset. The dead are easy to fool, easy to avoid… until they aren’t. I have learned not to underestimate them, back when I still had companions.

Supper tonight is a handful of single-serve peanut butter packages I scrounged from a semi-truck’s glove compartment. I peel the wrappers back on the corner and squeeze the viscous contents into my mouth like tubes of toothpaste, the oil has long separated and floats on top of the delicious sludge. I pass the expended rectangles to the mutt, who chews them to shreds in its efforts to abrade every last molecule of flavour.

I watch our back trail as the last of the day’s light fades. Clear.

The backpack empties of its usual contents, save for the stove, and I bed down for the night. There is no fire or cooking to occupy me so I huddle up against the cold in the scant minutes after sunset.

Life from before visits in my dreams, visions from a time that my memory promises happened, but that seem surreal given the present state of the world.

Laura and I are at the lake, I can’t see her but I know in the dream that she is making us coffee and she’ll be coming out of that screen door any second with a fat stack of bacon and today’s newspapers under her arm. Our dog barks at a squirrel nearby, wagging its stubby tail as it contemplates the scarred trunk of the pine tree. Except we never had a dog.

I can still hear it after I open my eyes, shrill warnings in the darkness. I spring up, struggling out of the embrace of my blanket. The dog is frantic now and I can see why.

Three figures stumble down the road a stone’s throw away, stragglers from the herd I collected throughout the day. They would have had me if not for the dog… or they might have walked right past my sleeping form. I will never know.

The poncho billows around me as I back away, taking in the threat. It looks like just the three, and I intend to keep it that way.

The mutt cheers me on as I step forwards. The foremost zombie reeks, his palpable cloud of stink preceding him by a dozen feet. I gauge his shambling speed and swing the brass-plated butt of the rifle into his head. The blow smears a handful of flesh from his temple and shatters his skull, sending the mass of rotting meat to the ground.

The other two march on, unheeding and uncaring of their comrade. I sidle nearer to the curb as they converge on me, causing them both to trip in turn on the sprawling body of the first. I kill them in the same manner and wipe bloody grease from the stock with a shred of fabric salvaged from a tattered sundress.

I stand in the road for several minutes, craning my neck to listen for the sound of feet shuffling over asphalt, but no more come to bother me. The dog materializes from the shadows, its entire matted rear-end wagging in scant moonlight.

I recover my blanket and settle back into my bed, reaching under my head to fumble with the clasp of the front pocket, coming away with my breakfast ration of peanut butter in its sealed rectangle. I peel the foil lid off and click my tongue.

The mutt leaps onto the poncho and I hold the peanut butter while it licks the plastic clean. Afterwards it settles its warm weight on my chest and curls up to sleep. I scratch behind its ears absentmindedly.

“Good dog.”

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The following link is the short story of the initial attack that collapses society, creating the ‘Afterwards’ timeline.

I could bear it all, if only the bodies polluting the air remained loyally dead.

Main Street seems empty through my binoculars save for a handful of cars sporting years of undisturbed dust and leaves, waiting for owners that will never return. The windows of the shops have long been broken. Birds flit through the empty space, nesting among old shelves now that their nemesis lay scattered and glimmering about the pavement.

Satisfied, I shoulder my backpack and step off to scavenge some of the outlying houses, picking my way down the fire-blackened road twisting before me, lined with ash-caked foundations of what had once been houses. My path curves, a lazy pirouette leaving tracks in the grey mud like a drunk man, but it pays to keep an eye behind.

I freeze when I see the owl. I’ve seen the son of a bitch before, even killed it once. I’m sure of it.

It perches a stone’s throw away on a crumbled diner’s facade above a weathered sign advertising soft serve ice cream and bait minnows for sale. That same fucking owl.

Cloaked in snow flecked with the colour of dead trees, fixing me with its predator gaze glinting golden in the soft sun. The shotgun swings down from my shoulder and covers the creature. It inclines its hooded head studiously but shows no concern. My hands grasp at the pocket where the shells sit, a mere handful now. The gun drifts, pointing to the ground.

Fear stabs me in the guts, an ice pick wound bleeding and draining me of my will. Go back, go back, dull footfalls lost to the intensity of my breathing.

I come up short.

A rotting remnant of a man stumbles into view at the far end of the road on stuttering legs, clad in filthy rags and reaching one ruined arm before him. A naked woman follows, her matronly wrinkles coming apart like paper towel at the seams. The wind brings a moan from a chorus of wasted throats as a mob shambles into sight after their leader.

Back towards the diner, practised eyes size up my options. The yards behind the houses sport overgrown fences too weak to hold the horde and high enough to slow me down. Onwards then.

I tighten the chest-straps on my backpack, securing the load against the ungainly swaying of my pained lope. Otherworldly groaning grows behind me and the hair rises on the back of my neck, lifeless eyes lust over my flesh.

The owl watches the intersection below its balcony. A boy in a faded superhero shirt shuffles to reach me from the mouth of the opposing road with the determined energy of the recently-turned, able to rouse itself for spirited bouts of speed.

He drops as a blast of buckshot collapses his skull.

I pump the gun and add one of the precious shells into the magazine as a handful of the dead emerge from where the boy had come, drawn to the noise and the promise of satiation it meant.

Cornered. I look to the diner, size it up. Back door maybe, but the parking lot is just as exposed… and that’s where the owl is. Where it wants me to go.

The mob closes in from down the melted road, bringing their raspy wheeze uncomfortably close. The owl hoots, a derisive noise inciting me to action.

I run towards the handful from where the boy had come. Abandoned cars funnel me closer to the corpses and the shotgun barks until they die a second death. The last of the shells disappears into the magazine.

More of them down the street, the mob swarms around the diner. Shit.

The front door of the nearest house buckles under my shoulder, the raspy cries of the damned close behind. I race up the carpeted steps as the splintered door slams against the wall under the press of clamouring bodies.

A dirty ray of light illuminates a rectangle on the hallway floor from a skylight above. There’s got to be an attic… a nylon string dangles from a square cover recessed into the ceiling.

It yields to my frantic pull, hingeing down and dropping a thin ladder to chest-height. I scramble up, kicking grasping hands away as I escape into the dark. I gag on the reek of decay in the air.

Panic rises in me as my backpack catches on the frame of the entrance. I wriggle to free myself— a weight falls onto me. I glimpse pale skin and bleeding gums as the attic’s occupant knocks us to the floor of the hallway.

I blink in the sunlight as the famished dead disassemble me. The owl stares down through the dusty glass. It cocks its head and hoots in triumph.

“You fucker!” I struggle to make myself heard over the crunching and groaning. “You fucker!”

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The following link is the short story of the initial attack that collapses society, creating the ‘Afterwards’ timeline.

Gravel crunches underfoot, a sullen sound born of disuse. The rifle follows my eyes from cracked windows to splintered sills. Sun-bleached curtains hang in stale stillness.

The encroaching huddle of knobbed trunks diffuses the chemical stink carried on the wind. A moment of calm. The last of the water does nothing to quench my thirst. The loose canteen cap bobs with every step, supplicant for the promise of fulfillment.

Steps slouch in the mud, barn-red paint worn from years, protesting under every step. Screen door springs creak under forgotten tension. A brass knob stands firm against my touch in the faded wood.

Boots thud across a narrow porch. A pale, desperate face tracks me in every window. I’ll never get used to my reflection.

The side door relents. The rifle follows my eyes from dingy cupboards to mouldy carpets. Clear.

Dry taps, oxidized and lifeless. The fridge hosts decayed meals and shriveled produce. Behind milky jars of-

Water. Oh fuck, two bottles.

It tastes of plastic and neglect and life.

The soiled vinyl flooring is softer than any of my most recent haunts, seducing me as I force sips to ensure the precious fluid stays down.

Minutes pass, or hours. The gentle, necrotic rhythm of the house is comforting as the breeze washes over. My heartbeat brings life back to this place at least once more, and we co-exist for a time.

The empty bottle goes in the backpack, slowly so as not to crinkle in the stillness. The second stares enticingly, but joins its depleted twin in the embrace of a filthy t-shirt after it fills the canteen.

The cupboards are fruitless. A hopeful shuffle of a stand of mugs betrays me, the foremost crashes to the floor. The rhythm holds with the rise of the wind outside. Lucky this time.

Something solid thumps to the second-storey floor above the kitchen. Scraping follows. Maybe not.

The living room stands as a testament to murder, its furniture disordered, caked in the leavings of old violence. Hanging photos of loved ones smile at the destruction from forgotten times.

Wet slithering rises, scraping approaches the landing above faded carpet stairs. The rifle follows my eyes as a corpse crawls into sight, delinquent in its duty to die.

Wretched lungs breathe a death rattle with every fill of its decaying chest. Pulling itself forward with a shattered arm, half a body, entrails spilling behind it. It tumbles down the steps in its haste to reach me, leaving smears of rotten flesh clinging to the pale green fabric covering the wood.

It rights itself on the living room floor, continues to haul itself along, exposed musculature reeking, pausing its overhead stroke, fixing me with a scarred, searching eye, assuring itself of its quarry, wheezing in enthusiasm.

I shush the creature. The heavy wood of the rifle stock breaks its spinal column.

The corpse gurgles its last.

The house settles, content again in its rhythm. The wind lulls outside as the soft, vinyl flooring calls to me. I give in, sink into the corner. Rest for a minute.

Just a minute.

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The following link is the short story of the initial attack that collapses society, creating the ‘Afterwards’ timeline.