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  “Makes sense,” I say, imagining hanging onto a window ledge and bombing the bushes hundreds of feet below.

  “Shoot,” Duck giggled, “I once pissed out that window and the wind picked up suddenly.” He shook his head at the memory. “Like walkin’ through a sprinkler, that was. I had piss sprayed up and down my whole body.”

  I tried not to picture it as we walked through a glass door and into a kitchenette. There was a small table covered in Formica with a chrome border. A fridge. A microwave. A sink. A stove. And at the stove was a slender young lady in a tank top and a ponytail.

  All of my previous expectations came flooding back.

  “Sissy,” Duck says as we enter the room. “This is Kid.”

  Sissy turns around and I am immediately blown away. She has to be nineteen or twenty, with big eyes and an agile frame. Suddenly the name “Kid” seemed highly inappropriate.

  “Kyle,” I blurt. “My names Kyle. I’m uh… I’m not a kid. It’s just some dumb name that Molly lady gave me. It’s stupid really. ‘Cause I’m clearly not a kid. She’s just… I don’t know… But she doesn’t know me and she isn’t very creative I guess.”

  “It’s bad luck to use your old name,” she says without expression, “and bad form to talk like that about my mother, Kid.”

  Damn.

  “Oh! I’m sorry! I didn’t know you were family,” I say hurriedly.

  “Didn’t I tell you, Kid?” Duck adds, “We’re all family here.”

  “But she really is my mother,” Sissy clarifies. “Since before all this. Now she’s like a den mother to us. Peter is like the father, Wood is the angry cousin, Dave and Duck are my strange uncles.”

  “Guess that makes you the little brother, ay Kid?”

  “No!” I start, louder than I should have.

  “How old are you anyways?” she asks.

  “Eighteen,” I say, and immediately regret not lying.

  Sissy laughs and says, “I think you would prefer Kid to Little Brother.”

  “How old are you?” I ask eagerly.

  “Twenty-two,” she says.

  Not completely out of reach.

  She turns back to the stove and her pot of soup. The smell is rich with vegetables and the consistency makes the meal look like stew.

  “Smells good,” I say, salivating.

  “Duck,” Sissy starts, “get Kid some crackers or something before he eats the spoon out of my hand.”

  “And I bet he would too,” the man says with a wink at me.

  “How’d you get the name Sissy?” I ask. Right away I realize my tone was too bold.

  “My mother used to call me that, before.” She never looks up from her dinner, but I don’t need to see her face. I know her expression by the sound of her voice.

  “I lost my parents and my brother,” I share.

  She turns and looks at me, redness swelling around her eyes. These were tears that had come often, and her eyes were well-practiced at this dance. She looks at me wordlessly, lips pressed firm and tears welling. Without a sound she turns back to the stove.

  Hide behind nicknames all you want, guys. There is no hiding from what is now the world. Looking at Duck and his saddened expression, I know the truth: We have all lost someone.

  And you don’t get the name Sissy for nothing.

  ◊◊◊

  Over the course of the next few weeks, Duck, Peter, Wood, and Dave taught me how to kill a zombie.

  In a word: Destruction.

  You can shoot a zombie all you want, but the virus apparently works as an animating factor throughout the body. The brain is useless according to Peter and Duck, who have tried countless ways to kill a zombie with a blow to the head.

  Bullets. Shotgun shells. Blunt force. Decapitation. None of these will stop a zombie. The only answer they could find was its complete annihilation. Smash every bit of the zombie you can. The gorier the better.

  “Take’ em out at the knees first,” Wood explains. “Once they’re immobile, they’re all yours. Just stay clear of the head and any fluid.”

  The men wear overalls, gloves, and helmets when zombie hunting. Blood exposure from the infected can be just as deadly to a breather as a bite.

  “That’s how they got Thor,” Peter explained. “Thor was a big ass blonde guy with arms the size of most guys’ legs. First day we went out he charged a deady and buried an axe in its head. He then mauled it in a rage the likes of which I may never see again. When he was done, Thor was panting hard and covered in bits of zombie.” Peter looked at his feet for a moment before returning his gaze to me. “Within a few hours he was clearly infected. And we put him down.” The last words were stifled with emotion, deep in Peter’s throat.

  I didn’t have to ask who bore the task of killing Thor.

  The men described the different ways they preferred to kill. Dave liked to smash a zombie with a weighted axe handle. He had capped it with metal rings. It looked similar to a warm-up bat a baseball player would use.

  Wood liked the net. “Trap’s them easily, then you can do whatever you want with them.” While he admitted that the technique didn’t work with a group of deadies, he said that one guy doesn’t want to find himself surrounded anyway. “One-on-one. Always attack when you have the advantage.”

  Duck liked to rope them and tie them. “Pointless,” Peter grumbled, but he didn’t ask Duck to change. All of the men agreed that you have to use the method that works best for you. “If you’re uncomfortable, then you’re dead,” Peter was fond of saying.

  As for how he liked to kill, Peter preferred to experiment. “The boys help me trap them, and I try to figure out what kills them.” He admitted attempts at drowning, incineration, acid, shooting, spearing, hanging, and all manners of dismemberment. “Laying in nine parts,” he mused, “and still trying. Nine parts squirming and reaching. They are always dangerous. Never get comfortable.”

  I started with the rope, but found that I didn’t have a knack for it. I also found that I didn’t have the stomach for bludgeoning. So I took to the net. It was easy, and I felt confident, but I needed more.

  “I need a dog catcher,” I shared with Wood one afternoon.

  “Why? Got a stray?” he asked sarcastically.

  “Kind of,” I said. “No, I need the tool, not the guy. You know, the pole with the noose on the end.”

  “A catch pole?” he said. “A rod with a snare on the tip?”

  “Yeah,” I said enthusiastically. “Got one?”

  He shook his head no, but the next day he handed me a long, thin plastic pipe with a cable loop on the end.

  “It’s not perfect,” he confessed, “but it’ll work. Slip the snare over a head, and pull on the end of the pipe.” With a zipping sound, the snare shrank. “Lock it in with a twist and you’re good to go.”

  I held the device in my hand. I was a real live zombie hunter.

  ◊◊◊

  Sitting at the kitchen table with the gang, eating dinner out of a can, the mood is quiet and thoughtful. I’ve been spending all of my free time working on snaring practice, and the rest of the time I am hanging out with Sissy. The wall she has built won’t come down, but she is still the most pleasant company in the mill.

  Peter stands suddenly and announces that the time has come.

  Everyone nods.

  We are going on a hunt.

  CHAPTER 5

  Of All The Things That I Have Lost…

  It has been weeks since I joined up with the group at the mill. Since then, I have learned all the basic skills necessary to survive on my own if it comes to that. I have no intentions of leaving my new family, but this is life in the new world. One day you are somebody’s child, spouse, or friend. Then next, one of you is dead and the other is either running for their life or being eaten. No one is safe, and no life is permanent, especially now. Heck, the group I live with doesn’t even use their real names anymore. I was born Kyle Moore, but no one here knows that. They all call me Kid. “You have
to give up who you were to make it in your new life,” said Peter one night, the unofficial leader of our little family. He’s named after the Peterbilt truck he used to drive, which is the most any of us know about him. Wood is named as such because he was a carpenter’s apprentice before his mentor tried to eat him. Nowadays he’s the group handyman, fixing things that need it and making what we don’t have if he can scrounge the materials. And then there’s Duck. He dresses and talks like he’s making fun of the cowboy stereotype, but after five minutes you realize that’s just who he is. Big-ass cowboy hat. Classic ‘Awe shucks’ attitude. Little nuts. He earned the name Duck when he spent his first night at the mill talking of little other than shooting fowl. Every other comment was how he sure was going to miss sending in his dog and blasting birds clean out of the air. It went on for hours. Peter got so tired of if he finally blurted, “I get it. You enjoy shootin’ duck. You never have to tell me again. In fact, how ‘bout we just call you Duck so you won’t think we have ever forgotten that the guy in the wide brim likes shooting birds?”

  “Gee. You mean it?” Duck asked, truly touched.

  The one they call Dave is the most difficult case study in the group, mainly because he doesn’t speak. Ever. The man hasn’t said a word since any of the group first met him. Peter started calling him Dave just to give the man a title, and he figured one name would be as good as any.

  The unsettling thing about Dave, besides the constant mute act, is the burning hatred for zombies that radiates through everything he does. You get used to a man not speaking faster than you could believe; within hours it’s an accepted fact and you make accommodations for it. It’s the rage that really creeps you out. Everything he does seems to be in preparation for destroying zombies. We eat to stay alive. Dave eats like a man fuels a chainsaw. We train to stay alive, so that when the time comes we don’t add to the population of Zombieville. Dave trains like a soldier caring for his weapon, so that when the time comes he can murder as many of them as possible.

  Not kill. Murder. His methods contain too much passion to be called anything else. Peter, Duck, and Wood collect zombies with ropes and nets. Peter works at finding the best ways to kill a zombie, and to expose the creatures’ weaknesses through experiments held back at the mill. It’s time-consuming and dangerous, but they have learned a lot.

  Dave smashes zombies with a weighted rod. He cave-mans every shuffler he sees until there is little more than a murky red stain on the ground. Wood swears he once saw Dave attack a group of eight zombies out in the open. No one does that, because it would be too easy for you to get surrounded. Once the horde circles you, you are as good as undead. “It’s like he wanted to die,” Wood told me. “But he was just smashing one deady after the next, making this barbaric howl the whole time. I stepped in and netted one to help. He killed seven and then did the one under my net. Right through the net! Smash! Smash! Smash! His coveralls were soaked in z-juice when we were all done. And I just looked at him, standing their covered in gore and holding than club of his. I was friggin’ happy that I wasn’t a zombie that day. He would have killed a hundred.”

  Of all the time I have spent with the group so far, I can’t help but wonder about people’s lives before the outbreak. I wonder, what does someone lose that makes a man become like Dave? What happened to him?

  Then there’s Molly and Sissy, the mother-daughter pair. Only Molly, who is the self-proclaimed “Molly Maid” of the mill, knows if Sissy was a big or little sister. “We don’t talk about who we used to be,” Molly had once said when I started asking about her history. “There’s no point. That life’s long gone. This is who we are now, and that’s that.”

  Truth be told, I didn’t really care about where she lived or what she used to do. What I really wanted was anything that could gain me points with Sissy. Ever since I met her, Sissy has been at the forefront of my mind. Everything about her leaves me breathless. Fit, gorgeous, and perfectly sexy. I was hooked the moment we first met. She’s twenty-two. I’m eighteen. Not an impossible span when 95% of the world is doing the rigor mortis shuffle. Not a lot of living competition, if you know what I mean. And I’d like to think that it’s not just me seeking time with her. She comes to find me several times a day, asking what I’m up to and wanting to train with me. Her mother forbids her from hunting with the boys. When the topic comes up, they share a look and an unspoken memory, and Sissy changes the topic. Molly wants her girl to be able to protect herself, but she will not allow her living daughter to go out of her way to find danger.

  “The whole world is one big carnival of terror,” Peter had once said. “Every ride can kill you. You don’t get on unless you are prepared to die, and Molly and Sissy aren’t ready to be separated from each other yet.” He took a long pause, staring at his hands. “They have something the rest of us don’t. We all lost family when the horde came. We all ran. Hell, I think you’re the only one of us who’s actually from Cheney.”

  “’Cause you don’t talk about it,” I finished.

  “Because we don’t ask,” he corrected. “Someday, if we live through this, we’ll tell the stories of our lives before the world died. For now,” he leaned forward and made sure I could see my reflection in his pupils, and said, “We focus on living and the life we want, not death and the life we lost.”

  Looking into his eyes, I thought, When I’m with Sissy, I have the life I want.

  God. Is it wrong that even in this post outbreak world, finding a girl is still my primary instinct? Or is it just taking initiative? Not a lot of girls running around right now, at least ones that don’t want to pin you down and consume you, that is.

  And she’s perfect.

  And she likes me.

  She may be my only chance.

  It’s the joke of fate that the group I become established with has someone that I find so attractive it distracts me from all else. And apparently, I’m not very sneaky with my feelings.

  “Kid,” Peter summoned me one day. I was in the break room of the mill, and Peter was sitting in what must have been the manager’s office when the facility was open. I got up from my conversation with Wood and Sissy, and plodded into the office with the swagger of a bad boy being called to the principal’s office. Wood mocked me and Sissy laughed. The sound of her voice was enough for me.

  “Shut the door, please,” came the voice from the desk. I did so, and turned to face Peter. No one claimed ownership of any room in the mill, but we all instinctively assigned the office to Peter. He was the man the group had put in charge. It only made sense that he belonged in this room, seated at the large metal desk. When he told me to take a seat, I didn’t get offended or feel like he was bossing me around. The man has led us with composure and level-headedness, so when he asks you to do something, you did it.

  “I think you should back off on Sissy,” he stated matter-of-factly.

  Suddenly, I fucking hated this man.

  “Now I see you disagree,” he continued. “Let me tell you what I see. I see a resourceful, strong, intelligent survivor sitting in front of me right now. But I also see an eighteen year-old. Kid, it wasn’t that long ago I was your age, and my God I remember the feeling of chasing girls.”

  “I don’t want to hear this,” I said abruptly, heat in my voice. He lost me at the whole, ‘back off’ comment.

  “I’ll finish, and then I’ll drop it. Fair?” he asked.

  I hated to answer, but said, “Fine,” in a curt, irritated voice which made me sound like a moody child.

  He took a pause, and then said, “I’ll make this quick. I did the dumbest things while chasin’ girls. I took risks that I wouldn’t have taken otherwise. You get sloppy around Sissy, which means you put yourself and her at risk in an attack. Now I’ve already talked with Molly…”

  “What?” I interrupted. The only thought in my head was, Why would he do that? The question raced back and forth in my mind as I searched for an answer, dreading the only one I could think of. “You want me to st
op spending time with her?” I asked, my heart proudly laid bare upon my sleeve.

  “I want you to get a more realistic view of our life here,” he replied.

  “How am I supposed to not talk to her, Peter?” I asked, cruel and juvenile scorn in the way I pronounced his name. I felt like he was betraying my trust. I felt like he was asking me to never be happy. I felt like he was asking me to ignore the fact that I had feelings for Sissy. I wanted to tell her my name. Tell her my life story. Tell her that I wanted my new story to be with her. Aren’t feelings like this supposed to inspire and drive a man to be better? Shouldn’t he be encouraging this? And it’s not just my feelings, either. Sissy likes me too. He’s telling us both we have to be unhappy.

  “Now I don’t know what happened to you, but you don’t know what she’s been through.” Peter said the words in a tone that did not condemn, but it certainly made me feel like he was trying to put me in my place. “You don’t know what she’s running from. Before this gets out of hand, both of you should reassess your actions and the safety of this family. Molly’s talking with Sissy right now, telling her to not get your hopes up too far.”

  I went rigid, and then frozen. It felt like my heart had been replaced with dry ice. I became cold, but felt as though I would burn anyone who touched me.

  “This is not a normal life, Kid,” Peter concluded. “Maybe when we settle down. But for right now, just focus on staying alive. If you want something to live for, think of how you are going to keep you and her alive until this is over. Show her that you can provide safety and resources. Prove to her that you can be the man she needs, and stop with the high school romantics and childish behaviors. You are a man in a world of killers. There’s no room to act like a kid anymore.”

  I stood, my chin stuck out slightly, and replied, “Well then thanks for the great nickname, Pete, ‘cause calling me ‘Kid’ for the rest of my life will really help me feel like a big man in an apocalyptic world.”