The Resolute

My legs carried me as fast as I could convince them to go. My body ached and was weary—lacrosse practice had only just begun. A gallon of sweat had soaked into my shirt and chest pads. My lacrosse stick was slick in my grasp as sweat lubricated my fingers. Practice had barely started when those junior-year fucks had dicked the whole team over by showing up late to practice.

Coach didn't appreciate lateness, in fact, he hated it so much that in order to teach the late comers a lesson, he gave the whole team a running practice. I know-yadda-yadda-yadda-your sport is our punishment and all that crap, but for god sakes, I run track and cross country but only to keep me in shape for lacrosse. Those long track and cross country practices came in handy though, I was probably in the best running shape of all the players on my team. Three guys were already doubled over and vomiting, the unusual heat and the long hour of running had taken its toll.

I stared up at the spring sun that was for some reason, shining very brightly today. It had been a hellish day all around, my parents had just left this morning for my aunt's. She was having her first child any day now and as a single mother, she wanted my mother—her older sister—to be there for her. I'd been left behind due to an upcoming lacrosse game and not being able to afford to miss any school. I needed to keep my grades high in order to get that full scholarship to Cornell. I was a moderately smart guy when I applied myself, but I really shone on the lacrosse field and Cornell had noticed that. But back to my crappy day—I had gotten a math test back with a B+ , a good grade, but not a perfect grade. And I needed perfect. Then those fucks had gotten the whole team a running workout and once this was over I'd have to go home and make dinner.

Coach had us running a big loop around all the fields behind out high school and this makeshift path took us right along the edge of the woods surrounding the back of our school. As we passed close by I smelled something really rank that burned the inside of my nostrils and made me start coughing. The burning in my chest increased and I ran faster to get away from the smell, eventually forgetting about it.

I chucked my reheated pizza on the kitchen table and turned on the TV. I'd just gotten out of the shower and was starting to enjoy this whole 'you're on your own now' thing. I kicked my shoes off and put my feet on the table as I tilted my chair back and started eating my pizza. The picture on the screen was actually pretty fuzzy and my brow furrowed at this. I stood up and thumped the top of the TV experimentally—which probably did no good seeing as how it was a thin flat screen. The picture flickered twice, then suddenly fizzled out. I tried pressing the power button and flipping through the channels but every channel was full of static. I shrugged my shoulders. That's the problem with these digital cable satellites every time there's a fucking solar flare, the picture goes.

I sighed and flopped back into my chair with a sigh and started plowing through my pizza. I demolished one slice and grabbed another without bothering to reheat it. I tapped my foot along to an imaginary beat in my head and absentmindedly flipped through the mail I had brought in earlier. A piece of saucy cheese feel on my sweat pants and I cursed under my breath. These were my favorite sweat pants and suddenly this night was turning into a shit show. I took my pizza with me to the laundry room to search for a clean pair of pants. I ended up taking a pair of jeans out of the dryer, they were a little snug on me but I liked to hold the disillusioned belief that they made my ass look good. I put the pizza down on top of the dryer and switched my pants. The pizza went back into my mouth as I went to the bathroom to soak my stained sweatpants. That stain was probably never going to come out.

With a sigh, I picked up a hair tie that I must have knocked onto the floor, it had been lounging on the bathroom sink—it was probably my mother's, she was always leaving her shit around in weird places. I stepped out of the bathroom and did a double take, I thought I saw something moving outside out of the corner of my eye. I moved closer to the window in the hall and peered out into the darkness. The sun still sets pretty early so soon into the spring. I could see nothing out there and nothing else moved so I walked back into the kitchen. We had a lot of deer around here so that was probably what I had seen, a deer hopping across the backyard. The TV still showed static and I lowered the volume instead of turning it off, because it was just too quiet here all alone with out any white noise.

My backpack sat on the kitchen counter and my mother would have killed me if she'd seen it there on her marble countertops. The kitchen was decorated in cherry wood and white marble, my mother has a thing for red and white, and from the kitchen I could see into the sitting room with the flat screen TV. The kitchen and sitting room were situated in the back of the house, up against the woods. We weren't exactly in the country, our neighbors were a stone's throw away from us but the woods behind out house made it seem like we were secluded. I drank some water out of a water bottle and finished off my second slice of pizza. I tended to be hungry after practice and even hungrier after a running practice, so I grabbed a third slice of pizza.

I ate this third slice of pizza slower than my other two, I wasn't as hungry for this third slice, so I could actually taste it as it was going down instead of inhaling it. I absentmindedly scratched my leg, picking at an old healed-over scab that was about to fall off. My phone suddenly vibrated, surprising me out of my oblivious state; I picked it up before it managed to vibrate itself off the table. It was my mother, telling me to behave and not throw any raging parties while she and my dad were away. That made me snort, thinking about partying made me groan in fatigue, my muscles screaming at me already even though I had already taken a blazing hot shower. I was in the middle of texting my mother back when I heard something strange, it almost sounded like a woman screaming. I jerked my head up from the phone and looked at the TV, expecting to see the cable back on.

There was nothing but static playing across the screen. I looked out the glass sliding door a few feet away from me and got up to lock it; there was nothing but darkness outside the door and I didn't want to turn the outside lights on. The front door had never been unlocked, I came in the through the garage today. We have an keypad-controlled garage door that we use instead of house keys because my mother and I are so scatterbrained, we kept losing them. I took another bite of my pizza and finished my text to my mother, telling her I was fine when I heard something strange. I couldn't even describe it. It was just a noise that grabbed my attention, there may not have even been a noise, who the fuck knows. I pushed my phone into my back pocket and slipped a sweatshirt on. A shiver still went down my spine and I shoved my feet into my sneakers and moved from the kitchen table to the sitting room. I settled into our comfy sofa, the muscles in my arms still tense from the strange noise I had heard. I took another bite of the pizza but it was tasteless in my mouth, so I chewed quickly and put the plate down. I eased back onto the sofa and some of my tension faded away. Our sitting room was also done in shades of red and my mother had given it a slight Asian theme. Okay, slight might have been an understatement. She was 100% Japanese and took pride in her heritage, there were kanji on the walls that meant strength and wisdom (I think) and some old family heirlooms lining the mantle over the fireplace.

There was an old fan framed and hanging up over the television with a painting on it that was so faded, that it was unidentifiable as anything other than discoloration from water damage. Some cracked vases were lining the mantle that had survived some earthquake or another by being carried out of a collapsing shrine by my great-great-great grandmother. There were countless other ancient nicknacks lying around that my mother loved to death, but my favorite by far, was the ancient 200-plus-year old katana hanging above the fireplace that was forged by the best blacksmith of the time. The wrapping about the handle was frayed due to long years of use and there was some nicks and chips along the metal itself. Ironically, it still looked like shit and my mother had recently taken it to a master restorer who had shined, sharpened and rewrapped part of the handle. She'd paid a pretty penny for that too. The sword was probably priceless with the way my mother treated it; it had been handed down through my mother's family for decades and she loved it fiercely. I stared at the static on the TV and tried to settle down. I was actually debating getting up and getting some ice cream when I heard a scratching sound from outside.

I jumped up just in time to see someone come crashing through my glass-sliding door. I let out a curse and a choked laugh at the belief that someone would actually run into a paneled glass door. I moved forward to go help the person who'd just run through my door.

"Hey, buddy-what the fuck?" I asked. The person lying on my kitchen floor had glass sticking out of all parts of their body and they had already made a pool of blood and other gore on the wood floor. There was something unnatural about the way their arm was positioned and there were chunks of skin and hair on the floor. It was like the person in front of me was falling apart. I leaned closer to investigate when the person suddenly grabbed my ankle and knocked me off my feet with the force of their yank.

"Fuck!" I yelled as they yanked my feet out from underneath me with inhuman strength; I looked at the person's face and realized they were missing an eyeball and their skin was a sickly gray pallor. Almost instantaneously I took in the rest of the individual; they were wearing clothes that hung off their body, making it obvious that they were female and it looked like she was decaying. She gripped my leg with her good hand and used her broken arm to latch onto my foot and right before my eyes, she started lowering her mouth to my leg. I stayed frozen for a fraction of a second, it looked like she was trying to bite me. My own screaming brought me back and I kicked out at her face with my free foot. My shoe smashed into her face and I heard a sickening crunch as I broke her nose and probably dislodged a handful of teeth.

That didn't stop her; it merely delayed her a second or two before she tried to bite my leg again. I slammed my free foot onto her broken arm and managed to kick free, scrambling backwards. She was making a strange groaning and clicking noise as she tried to breath through her broken nose. The sound of it almost made me hurl but I was way too fucking scared and confused. She started to crawl towards me, opening her mouth in a moan and I got a glimpse of a bloody mouth with clumps of flesh stuck in between the teeth. Her eyes had once been brown, they were now cloudy. Shaking, I reached for the closest thing near me and threw it at her, hoping to slow her down so I could gain a fraction of a second to think. Unfortunately, I ended up throwing a pillow at her and it did absolutely nothing in the way of slowing her down. I jumped up on the couch and as she started trying to stand up, I kicked her hard enough in the chest to send her reeling to the floor. But kicking didn't seem to be stopping her. I needed to fucking rip her goddamn head off or something. I was about to jump over the side of the couch and run for the knives in the kitchen when a silver glint caught my eye.

I ran for the samurai sword, using a wood coffee table as a launching pad to throw myself up high enough to be able to knocked the glass case off the wall were it hung. The glass case hit the floor before I did and shattered; I landed next to it, cut to ribbons on glass that slit my skin. Suddenly, there was a vice grip on my thigh and I scrabbled around in the broken glass for my prize. Victorious, I sat up and slammed the sword home, right between her eyes as she prepared to start disemboweling me.

I sat there and panted loudly as her blood and gore dripped all over me and the wind whispered in through the broken glass door. After a minute or so, screaming rousing me and I pushed her off of me. I turned to the side and promptly vomited up my pizza on my mother's prized wood floors. What the fuck had happened her? Jesus Christ, I had just killed someone. Someone who'd been trying to eat me. Someone who had burst in through my glass door like a fucking psychopath, who couldn't feel pain and who was akin to a juggernaut. I ran a bloody hand through my clean silver hair and could feel her blood dripping down my cheek. I was about to pull my cellphone out of my pocket to call the police when I realized I could hear screaming. I got up and stuck my head out of my broken glass door toward the neighbor's house. I could hear woman, maybe a girl, screaming for help.

I stood in the doorway torn; should I call the cops or should I go help my neighbor's? My neighbor's, the people I'd grown up with, who'd watched me when I was young and came to all my parent's Christmas parties? I shook my head, tightened my grip on my mother's antique sword and made up my mind, running out the backdoor and across our backyards to the neighbor's house. Their backdoor was intact, so obviously the cause for their screaming hadn't arrive via the back entrance. I jerked their backdoor open, letting out a sigh of relief that they hadn't locked it. The screaming was coming from the second floor and as I turned the corner and ran up the stairs, I noticed the front door hanging off its hinges, like it had been torn off. I took the stairs two at a time, my once sore muscles animated by adrenaline. I heard a loud thump and a gut-wrenching noise that sounded like the tearing of flesh. There was another horrified scream. I slowed down, realizing that if I barreled head on into a bad situation, I could get myself killed. I peered around the corner into the first bedroom and saw a king-size bed, soaked in blood and chunks of flesh and bone. It looked like someone had been ripped to shreds. I swallowed back rising acid and my eyes followed the trail of gore down the hall and into a room at the end of the hall. I tried to remember as much as I could about my neighbors; they were older people who had adopted a daughter. They used to babysit me and I faintly remember playing with their daughter but they were a little over protective and she was sent to a private school. Since our childhood, I had only seen her in glimpses and passing glances. As I tried to remember her face, I heard a scream and a heavy pit settled in my stomach.

The scream spurred me into action and I ran down the hallway, bursting into the last bedroom, taking only a second to examine the scene before me. A decaying man with his jaw hanging dislocated was advancing on a girl with short red hair. She screamed and swung a heavy physics textbook at her attackers face and he crumpled to the floor. But as I had discovered the hard way, these weird attackers didn't feel pain. The man collapsed to the floor but instantly started crawling towards her, quicker than even I expected.

"Help me!" She yelled, looked up at me, I gritted my teeth and swing my sword like a hockey stick, almost beheading her attacker. He kept crawling towards her, but at a much slower pace. I grimaced and put a foot on his back, slamming him into the ground and using my new advantage point to finish the job I had started. I hacked the guy's head off and dropped the sword before collapsing onto a pink bed.

"What the fuck's going on?" She sobbed at me.

I just shook my head, this was the second person I'd met who was impervious to pain in less than five minutes. This was wrong, there was definitely something going on. I thought quickly and nervously chewed my lip. "Where are your parents?" I asked. "We need to call the police..." I added as an after thought.

As soon as I mentioned parents, she started screaming in little fits. I looked over at her and it was like I wasn't myself. I didn't feel the pain or hysteria coming off of her, it was like I had no compassion. It was probably shock setting in. I pinched myself hard on the arm and spurred myself into action. I pulled my now bloody cell phone out of my pocket and dialed 911. It rang twice before a message saying the lines were flooded came on and told me to press zero if it was an emergency. I was about to press the button when over the girl's hysterics I heard a shuffling noise. I hung up the phone. I got up and left the room so I could hear better but not before I picked up that sword, if it was another one of those things I wanted to get it before it got me. Stopping just outside the doorway, I tried to mentally cancel out the noise that girl's freak out was causing when I heard the sound of nails raking against wood. I hadn't noticed earlier but one of the doors had a chair underneath the doorknob, preventing anyone from leaving the room. But didn't the door open into the room? The chair was useless... I walked down the hall and stood before that barricaded door; the raking stopped for a second before the sound of a body being thrown against the door started. I was uneasy.

"Hello..." I called out. There was no response. I kicked away the chair blocking the knob and suddenly the crying girl was there. She threw herself against the door propping her body to lay against the door, screaming and cursing at me, yelling at me to put the chair back. I obliged and jammed the chair under the door before whoever was on the other side realized that the chair had been removed at all. After I jammed the chair back in place, she started quietly sobbing to herself. I stared at the door hinges and realization dawned on me, for some reason, this door swung open into the hallway. That chair was keeping someone in.

"Who's in there?" I asked, voice barely above a whisper.

"Some fucking thing!" She bit out harshly, her breathing was ragged and she remained on the floor at my feet, like her muscles weren't strong enough to support her weight. She looked like a fucking mess; she was still in her private school uniform but it was stained with blood and the skirt was torn. Her eyes were red and swollen from crying, her hair stuck to her face from her drying tears.

"How many of them attacked your house?" How many of these things were out there, I wanted to ask. But she didn't have the answer to that question. I wanted to ask her so many questions but I knew she couldn't answer the ones that boggled my mind the most. What was going on? Who or what were these things that were barely people?

This question set her off in a sob-scream and I had to wait a few minutes for her to calm down. This time, I slide down the wall sitting the ground next to her, rubbing her on the back as she screamed her heart out. I kept one ear peeled, listening for any sound besides us and the thing on the other side of the door. Finally, she rubbed her eyes and nose on her sleeves. "One of those things attacked my mother. She... she was sleeping in bed. She'd been feeling bad. She was fucking sick! And that thing!" She started screaming and pointing at the barricaded door. "That thing ripped her to pieces! We heard her screaming and my father and I ran up the stairs when we found her...she...Daddy—he pulled that thing off her and it bit him. Bit him! We locked it into the bathroom and left it there. My father ran back to my mother and I tried to call the police... but they were busy. Then I heard this snapping noise...

It was my father, he was eating my mother! He was chewing her bones and I screamed. He turned and saw me and I just screamed... and Daddy why! It just... he was fine one minute and wrong, just wrong, the next.

He came after me and I had to hit him and he wasn't my Daddy anymore, he was a monster. He ate my mother and tried to eat me. It was like he turned into one of those things after it bit him..." She trailed off and we sat there rocking together, her from the sadness of losing her surrogate parents, me trying to stave off the terrible thoughts that I had killed two people tonight.

After a few minutes I stood up and brought her with me. "Come on, come back to my house. The police can't help us right now and there's no cable... I have the feeling that we're not the only ones having trouble tonight." I tugged her along after me and she followed obediently like a sniffling and sobbing puppy. As we walked past the bed that held the remains of her mother, she shuddered and buried her head into my dirty t-shirt. Only the sound of the scrabbling on the wooden door followed us.

We went out the back door, I thought we should stay as far from the street as we could; I peered out at the darkness between our backyards for a few minutes before making my mind up, we had to go now. "Hey, girl..."

"Kairi." She supplied.

"Riku." I replied. "We're going back to my house, it's just right there. We're running—I don't want one of those fucking things seeing us." She nodded in understanding. "Ok, I'm going to hold your hand and on the count of three, run as hard as you can." We were neighbors but our houses seemed miles apart at the moment. I counted out loud and on three, I grabbed her hand and took off running, almost dragging her behind me. My heart was pounding in my throat making the thirty second run feel like a thirty minute run, I could hear Kairi rasping along as she tried to sprint with me. I felt bad but I sure as hell didn't slow down. I dragged her to the back door and ran through without stopping, all the glass was gone anyway. I stopped running and dropped Kairi's hand. She bent double, struggling to inhale air. But I had to be certain we were safe here. I grabbed Kairi and put a hand over her mouth to muffle the sound of her breathing. "Quiet down for a second!" I whispered. She nodded against my hand and held her breath for a few seconds. The house was still and didn't utter a sound. "Ok." I sighed.

I dropped my hand from her mouth and she sagged down onto my couch, shuddering when she saw the dead girl who decorated my wood floor. She looked up and stared at the broken glass and the headless girl. "What happened to you," she asked. "How did you know to come save me?

It took me a few minutes to start my short story. "I was sitting here... eating when it—she came through my glass sliding door. She grabbed my legs and tried to bite me but I grabbed my Mom's antique sword and..." I let her fill in the blank on the last part, I couldn't bring myself to say that I'd stabbed and killed someone. "Then, I heard you screaming and I ran over—your parents used to baby-sit me and I figured that maybe someone was attacking you guys too." I supplied lamely, I hated to bring up her dead parents to her. Adopted or not, they were—had been—her family.

We sat in silence. "Thanks for saving me." She said. I nodded. "But what do we do now? Are there more of those things out there? We're not safe here are we?"

"I just want to know what's wrong with them..." I answered. "Hold on, my mom might be able to help, she's a doctor." I quickly dialed my mom's number and got her voice mail. I left a short cryptic message, "Mom, it's Riku. Call me back when you get this message—you won't believe what happened..." I dialed my Dad too, who was an ex-Marine, it went straight to voicemail for him as well. I snapped the phone shut with a sigh, still no answers.

"Where are your parents?"

"At my Aunt's house—they left this morning. I've been alone here." I replied.

"Rikue, we need to leave here. What if there are more?" Kairi asked, her voice range bordering on hysterical.

"But where would we go? They could be everywhere. They could have overrun the entire town—the entire eastern sea board by now." I groaned, cradling my head.

"I don't know—I just don't want to stay put, I feel like we'll die if we stay put."

"Look, we don't even know if there are anymore of those things out there. For all we know these could have been the only two people who were fucking attacking other fucking people. What if we're over reacting? This doesn't have to be some big epidemic Kairi—maybe these guys just got rabies or some fucking weird disease like that and it made them crazy..." I trailed off.

Kairi turned and glared at me, her eyes bloodshot from crying. "Rabies takes a while to show any effect, it doesn't happen instantly, like with my Dad! That's not rabies! And it could very well be an epidemic! If even one other person was walking around like these two and got into a house—infecting a family—they'd become one of them too. And then the infected keep infecting and within hours the entire town could be overrun!"

I sighed, she had a point, off in the distance I heard a chorus of screams. Our eyes met and she jumped up. "Ten minutes," I replied. "We are going to pack everything we need in ten minutes. I don't know if you want to go back to your house and get anything but in ten minutes I am getting in my parent's Explorer and driving away." She nodded in understanding. "I'm going to grab some essentials—my parents have this house stocked—but you might want to grab some clothes." Another scream interrupted me, closer sounding than the last one. "Scratch that, borrow my mother's clothes; you're almost the same size." She nodded again, her eyes wide from fear. She'd never been in a situation like this before—not that I ever had either—but I'd inherited my father's steady demeanor in times of trouble. "You're going to pack the truck with nonperishable food—or just any food you can get your hands on that doesn't need to be cooked. I'm going upstairs to get the rest of what we're going to need." I propped open the garage door with my book bag and grabbed the keys off the counter, pressing the unlock button before I ran upstairs—sword still in hand.

I ran into my parent's bedroom and raided their closet. My dad had stored a lot of his old Marine stuff in there. I grabbed two huge duffle bags and two heavy duty sleeping bags. There was a first-aid kit in the bathroom that went into the pile—my mother being a doctor, it was pretty well stocked. I ripped open some of my mother's dresser drawers and grabbed clothes for Kairi, including some underwear and a pair of sneakers—for the life of me I couldn't remember if she was even wearing shoes. There was a lockbox under my dad's side of the bed that I snatched up and quickly unlocked. In it was a gleaming black glock hand gun. I checked the clip to make sure it was fully loaded and checked the safety before I tucked it into the waistband of my jeans, at the small of my back. Better safe than sorry, my dad always said. Besides, I knew how to fire a gun, my dad was a Marine and had been a cop before retiring a year ago. He'd always made a big deal about me learning fire arm safety and learning how to use a gun correctly had been a high priority for him. There was another fully loaded clip of ammo in the box and I stuffed it into my back pocket. I grabbed the other duffle bag and sprinted to my room, shoving a pair of jeans, t-shirt and sweatshirt into the bag before grabbing my emergency money from the hidden stash in my underwear drawer. When I'd made an emergency money stash, I figured it be used incase I forgot to get someone a birthday present. A rabies epidemic hadn't crossed my mind. I looked my room over once more and grabbed my laptop on a second though, dislodging the video game case on top of it. The case feel to the floor and I froze.

The game was face down but I knew what it was. It was Call of Duty. I couldn't tear my eyes from the images on the back cover—it was a video game about World War II and the pictures on the back triggered something in my memory. Some thing about the game reminded me of what had happened to us and I shivered, shaking it off. Right now, I didn't need the strange sense that I was missing something. I went back to my parents room and started stowing everything into the duffle bags. I slung the bag over my back and ran back down the stairs with them. Kairi was packing cans of food into plastic bags she must have found some where. She saw me coming and ran ahead of me to stash what must have been the last bag of food, into the back of the truck. I tossed the duffle bags and sleeping bags into the trunk and looked down at Kairi's feet. She was shoeless. "I packed you some shoes." She nodded. "Get in the car unless you can think of anything else we need." And in a flash she ran back into the house.

I looked around the garage and saw my dad's survival pack on top of his tool box. I chucked that in too, god forbid if we needed to go into it. That would mean that for some reason we had no other supplies left. I grabbed a case of water bottles from the refrigerator in the garage and ran back into the kitchen. Kairi almost collided with me. She had a knife in her hand and two rolls toilet paper. I raised an eyebrow at her.

"Fuck you, I have priorities." She said. I didn't say anything but gestured to the car. We both hopped into the car. The samurai sword within arms reach in the passenger seat next to Kairi. She settled in and I turned the car on. Over the rumble of the powerful engine, I heard the sound of someone throwing themselves against the garage door. Kairi whimpered and clutched the door of the truck. She pressed a button to lock all the doors and I opened the garage with the remote in the car, preparing myself for the worst.

Someone launched themselves at the back of the truck and I glanced in the rearview mirror for a second before throwing the truck in reverse and stomping on the gas. Who ever had jumped on the truck lost their grip and was run over by the front tires before I even cleared the driveway. Kairi groaned at the sickening crunch of bone. I reversed on to the street in front of our houses and sat idling for a second—staring at the destruction before us. The houses further down the street were being over run by people running and screaming—I couldn't tell who was infected and who wasn't but I had a terrible feeling in the pit of my stomach. Kairi started screaming when people down the street noticed us. They began running towards us and from the nature of their gait we could both tell that they were infected. They just didn't move right. They kind of jerked around—like their limbs weren't functioning right.

I quickly reversed and made a U-turn, going up onto the lawn across from us and then heading down the street away from the mayhem behind us. "Well that settles that." I said with a sigh.

"Huh?" Kairi asked.

"It may not have been an epidemic before, but it's becoming one damn quick."

"How could this all have happened so quickly?"

"I don't know."

"How could they all get rabies so fast?"

"Kai—I don't think they have rabies." I came to a realization—I knew what they were. "They're fucking zombies."

"Zombies?"

"You see, Call of Duty has this mini-side game thing with zombies—you shot zombies, grey shambling guys with their flesh hanging off and their limbs hanging. They don't feel pain but they try to eat you and they can't talk...only groan." I could see her processing all this information in her head and I expected her to tell me I was nuts from playing so many video games. But she didn't say anything like that.

"Have you ever won the game?" She asked.

My mouth twisted into a grimace. "You can't win the game—you have only so much ammo and there's an infinite number of zombies."

We were quiet for a while before Kairi turned on the radio and started flipping through stations. A lot of the stations were static but there were some people broadcasting still.

"-undead. They seem impervious to pain and won't stop unless beheaded. Do not let them bite you! I repeat—Do not let them bite you! A bite from the undead will instantly infect you and within minutes to hours you will become one of them. This is Axel McShane, broadcasting to you, live, from the WRXN station.

I've been getting calls almost nonstop about strange people attacking and eating people. These aren't people anymore though-they're the undead! They're the reanimated corpses of our loved ones. Zombies, people.

It's you or them. They will try to eat you and you must defend yourself or you'll become one of them. No official statements have been released from the government yet but don't count on the army coming to bail us out any time soon. We're not the only ones getting attacked; across the entire country, the dead are walking."

"I know him." Kairi said. "He went to my school...why is he still broadcasting? Why doesn't he leave too?"

"Maybe he's crazy." I replied.

"No," Kairi shook her head. "I'm going to call him." She motioned for my cell phone and I shifted a little so I could grab it from my back pocket. She deftly dialed a phone number and held the phone to her ear, waiting for Axel to pick up.

"Axel—it's Kairi. No! I'm fine. I'm with my neighbor—long story, we're getting the hell out of here. Do you want to come with?" I shot a glance over at her and she pointedly ignored me. "Turn down this street," she told me and I made a sharp turn to the left, following her directions. "We'll be there in ten minutes. Be ready." She hung up and handed me back my phone, I tucked it in my pocket, reluctant not to have it on my person at all times. We couldn't afford to lose our only phone.

I was silent.

"He graduated a year ago and his parents died in a car crash last year—he has no one. We became good friends when he tutored me in Chemistry in the fall."

"Why is he still at the station?"

"No car—no way to get away."

I nodded from what I'd heard, the station was pretty secluded, surrounded by woods—Axel probably hadn't even been attacked yet. Kairi continued to give me more directions, there were few other cars on the street and most of the houses were dark. We raced past about five zombies on our way to the station, we were taking less urban streets to avoid most of the mess. She pointed to a driveway, partially obscured in the darkness by bushes. The headlights lit up the driveway but didn't reveal any zombies. I pulled up in front of the broadcast station, my wheels spinning gravel. I looked around anxiously, not wanted to be stop until I was sure there was nothing threatening in the nearby vicinity. My senses were on high alert and I tried to peer past the headlights into the darkness. Suddenly, there was a knock on my window and I jumped. It was a normal looking guy with spiky red hair and green eyes. Kairi unlocked the door and he jumped in behind me.

"Holy fuck! Kairi, thank you for coming to get me!" Axel cried. "And you must be Kairi's knight in shining armor!"

Axel turned to me but Kairi started crying hysterically again and Axel convinced her to come sit in the back of the truck with him. I turned around and drove out of the driveway with only one destination on my mind. The Summersville Gun and Ammo Supply Store. My dad is a frequent shopper there. Kairi sobbed into Axel's chest and I glanced back in the rearview mirror at them. He looked up and met my eyes—green locking with blue. I broke contact to look back at the road ahead, I was driving over fifty mph on these windy side roads and then through residential streets, where I picked up speed. I noticed Axel hadn't come into the truck empty handed, he'd brought a metal baseball bat with him. I couldn't help myself, I smirked at the thought of how much damage I could do with that thing. I pulled the truck to a stop in front of the ammo store, there were one or two zombies hanging around in the parking lot but the payoff for going inside completely outweighed the risks in my mind. A hero needs his weapons.

Kairi stopped sniffling long enough to ask me what we were doing here. "We need weapons." I replied.

"I don't know how to shoot a gun..." Kairi whispered.

"Me either..." Axel agreed.

"It's a simple as point and shoot." I deadpanned.

"Where the fuck did you find this guy?" Axel whispered loud enough for me to hear. Kairi elbowed him in the stomach.

"I'm going in. Someone is coming with me and someone is staying in the truck ready to drive. Which one of you is doing what?" I asked. I was getting antsy with all the zombies wandering the parking lot. They had noticed us and were staggering over, they looked like they had somehow broken their legs and were staggering towards us at a slow pace. But something told me that other—more agile zombies might soon be on us.

"I'm going in with you." Axel said, "I can carry more stuff than Kairi." I nodded, it sounded like a logical decision. He turned to Kairi. "Lock the doors when we leave but be ready for when we come out. If they get to the car start driving around or something."

"No," I said. "Here." I pulled the gun out from my waistband and handed it to her.

"I don't know how to use this!" She held it away from her pointed down.

"It's easy, point and shoot. I clicked the safety off and jumped out of the truck, Axel and Kairi followed suite. Kairi ran around the truck and jumped into my seat almost before I'd gotten out of the way. I reached over her and grabbed the sword. I wasn't about to leave that thing behind—it had saved my life too many times today already.

Axel grabbed his bat and raised an eyebrow at my sword. "Jesus, what the fuck do you need an ammo store for, your stocked dude!"

"You don't play enough Call of Duty do you?" He shrugged at me. "Limited ammo, infinite number of zombies." I replied as if that answered his question. It must have because he jogged towards the door looking at the shambling zombies coming towards us. He tried to open the door but it was locked. He turned to me as if to give up. "The bat." I answered. He looked at the bat as if he'd really just seen it for the first time and didn't know how it got in his hand. I was about to tell him to hurry up when he lifted the bat and swung it into the glass of the front door. It cracked and he swung again causing the glass window to shatter and cave in. He reached through the broken window and opened the door from the inside.

"This is probably the most illegal thing I have ever done." He replied and I just nodded my head at him, keeping an eye on my shambling friends who were coming ever closer. They didn't look too bright and were actually pretty overweight which made them exceptionally grotesque zombies. We walked into the ammo store and I cast a glance over my shoulder at Kairi before we went in, she was sitting in the driver seat, clutching the gun so tightly her knuckles were white. I felt bad leaving her all alone but all three of us going in wasn't a smart idea; it would leave us trapped in the ammo store. Axel went in first, peering around the small store, his bat up. He motioned that it was empty and I stepped in, sweeping my eyes over the guns hanging on the walls and the ammo lined up in the showcases. It was so easy.

"Grab what I tell you to and take as much ammo as you possibly can." I said.

"Right-o Captain." Was his smart aleck reply.

I jumped over the counter in one swift move even though my sore muscles protested, I grabbed a shot gun and told Axel to grab a rifle and some ammo. I figured he would at least be able to tell the difference between a hand gun and a rifle. I swung the shot gun under my shoulder and tucked my sword into one of my belt loops as a makeshift sheath. I started lining up shot gun ammo on the counter and grabbed a tiny handgun and its ammo, figuring Kairi could probably handle it. I started picking more weapons off the wall, the snipers were left behind—they just weren't worth their weight, but the hunting rifles, I was glad to have. I bypassed the fancy weapons in favor of tried and true classics that I remember my father mentioning to me. When I was done I had two shot guns slung over my shoulder and a hand gun tucked into my waistband and a rifle in the left. I thought I was armed to the teeth until I saw a wicked looking knife that I tucked into another belt loop—it also screamed 'Kairi' at me. I had a pile of ammo in front of me that Axel swept into a huge bag he'd found. He had huge rifles over one shoulder and had a revolver in his other hand.

We looked at our hoard and then at each other and laughed. Then one of the parking lot zombies pounded on the window, trying to get into the door we'd closed behind us. Axel paled and I looked at him. "I'll take this one." I said with reluctance, I didn't want to kill more people but it was necessary.

"No, I need to practice what I preach." He said and then he sighted down his revolver on a shaky hand. He squeezed off one shot—it missed—and then another. This one connected and hit the zombie in the cheek. He hit the ground and didn't get back up.

"Nice shot?" I said, unsure of what to say to the guy when his complexion looked so green and pasty. He nodded and squeezed his lips together. I led the way out of the store in time to see Kairi roll down the truck window and empty a clip point blank at the other zombie who had been slobbering on my truck's windows. We ran to the truck and jumped into the back and Kairi slammed on the gas before Axel even got the door closed. I realized a second later why Kairi had been so eager to leave. There were at least five zombies coming into the parking lot right in front of us, they must have been attracted by the sounds of Axel smashing in the window. To avoid the zombies rushing towards us, Kairi swerved off the parking lot asphalt and onto the grass, cutting across the path the zombies were taking. She was breathing in gasps and I think the only thing keeping her from hysteria, was the fact that a lot of her energy was going into concentrating on driving. She was barreling down the street at 70 mph and the needle was creeping higher and higher.

After ten minutes, she started slowing down and her breathing became regular. I crawled into the front seat, leaving my guns behind but bringing my sword with me. "Kairi, take this next turn off and get on the Interstate." I instructed.

"Where are we going?" Axel asked.

"My aunt's," I replied. "She lives out in Bumble Fuck, Nowhere and my parents are there. If there was anywhere that's safe it'd be there. It's a four hour flight but I think it takes a day by car. It's been so long since I've been there..."

"Then how do you know where it is?" Axel asked.

"I know the address and general directions, when we get to the point where the directions run out we can start worrying."

Axel was silent but Kairi spoke up. "It's not like I have any where to go, so I'm in." She brushed a piece of brains out of her hair and turned on to the Interstate.

"I'm in too—I owe you guys."

Kairi slammed on the brakes, the Interstate was backed up from the ramp and we could see overturned vehicles and car fires lighting up the night sky. There was screaming and moaning and I could see people climbing over the cars. From this far away it was impossible to tell who was who. Who was zombie and who was living. It looked like all hell had broken lose, it was like the rush hour traffic jam from hell. "What do I do?" Kairi asked.

"Turn around and keep driving down the road we came from, we'll take side roads. There are less people, there should be less zombies..." I sounded so sure of myself but I had no idea where I got all this confidence from. Kairi continued to drive, constantly heading north until I noticed her getting groggy. We switched spots and she laid down, wrapped in a cocoon by one of my sleeping bags. We had passed very few other people and cars. We'd met one family heading down south and Axel gave them his revolver with ammo. They would need it more than we would. The scenery around us was unchanging and I sighed in relief when I saw a sign for a gas station.

"Thank God, we were almost on empty." I said and Axel nodded, he'd been quiet, which I'd gathered wasn't his usual persona. He seemed like a chatty guy but I figured he was silent for a reason. There'd been five minutes of small talk where I told him I was Riku Collins and he told me a bit about himself. It felt like we'd known each other longer, since that intimate moment we shared in the ammo store when he'd killed that zombie. I turned off the main road onto a side road that I followed for almost five miles. There was a quant little gas station at the end of the road that had a car or two parked in the parking lot but it seemed deserted.

"Let's do this fast, I want to get something done today that doesn't involve beheading someone." I said, sadly, there was not even a sarcastic note in my voice.

"That reminds me," Axel spoke for the first time in about three hours, his voice raspy from disuse. He cleared his throat and continued on. "When we were in the ammo store, I shot that zombie in the face and he didn't get back up. I know I'd been saying on the radio that they needed to be beheaded...but maybe you just need to destroy their brains. What about their hearts? Have you shot one in the heart yet?"

I shook my head, I'd only beheaded my zombies and stabbed in the head... it was the only way I knew for certain they wouldn't get back up. " He shrugged his shoulder in response and I pulled up to a gas pump. I pulled some money out of my back pocket, the way most gas pumps were set up, you had to pay the machine first to get the gas, making it harder to steal. "I'm pumping the gas, you cover me." I said, hopping out of the car. I started pressing buttons and a message flashed across the screen that said pay inside. I turned around and opened the truck door, sticking my head in. "I have to go inside to pay, I'll be back—leave the car running until I get back." He nodded and rolled down his window, angling his body so he had a clear view of the door leading into the mini mart where I had to pay. The door to the shop was hanging off its hinges and I had a terrible feeling in my gut about that. I grabbed the shot gun and a few bullets, leaving my sword behind for the first time tonight—probably not a good idea, that thing had saved my ass too many times already. I started towards the mini mart, cautiously checking my surroundings by sighting down my shot gun, it was impossible to see into the woods beyond the light from a nearby lamp post. I peered into the shop's window and saw nothing moving, I heard nothing. The door was already hanging open so I slipped silently inside, checking behind all the stands and looking down all the aisles. I jumped over the countertop so I could get to the cash register. There was a door to my left that I put my ear to. I didn't hear anything but I wasn't taking any chances, the rest of the shop was clean but who the fuck knew what was behind that door.

I braced my shot gun so that it blocked the door opening, I was weaponless for the moment but from my vantage point and a well placed security camera screen, I could see the parking lot and the shop clearly. There was no movement anywhere. I started poking at the cash register, trying to figure out how to turn the pumps on when I noticed the pump controls on the wall. I pressed the button for our pump and plugged in fifty dollars worth of gas. I figured that would be enough to fill the truck's tank. But my truck got such poor mileage and on the back roads, gas stations were few and far in between. Then, I noticed the section one could select if they knew how much gas their tank could hold, I selected that instead of the money option and typed in my tank's size, this way I could look for a way to get extra gas in case of an emergency. I glanced around and found what I was looking for in one of the boxes behind, the counter—a tank to carry gas in and a tube to run the gas through. I grabbed the stuff for the gas and my shot gun and got out of that mini mart quickly. It gave me a bad feeling how the door was hanging off the hinges. Strangely enough, there were no other signs of trouble. It looked like who ever had been here had been dragged off without much of a fuss. I got back to the truck and started the gas pumping. I opened the driver side door again and told Axel I was going to try and get more gas. He just nodded his head at me and tightened his grip on his gun. Axel had adapted quite quickly to this strange team we'd made, him, Kairi and myself.

I jogged over to one of the cars parked on the outskirts of the lot, it was so strange that they'd been left here—I didn't want to think about it. I opened the gas compartment and took off the lid, putting my tube deep enough into the tank that it would land in any gas in there. I put my mouth on the other end of the tube and sucked until gas flooded my mouth. I sputtered and spat the gas out onto the pavement beside me. The gas started to flow from the tank into by carrier, suddenly there was banging on the window next to me and I jumped back, stumbling over my shot gun. There was a zombie trapped in the car, they must have locked themselves in to escape another zombie and turned before they could drive away. I shuttered at how terrible it was to be trapped inside one's own car, changing into what was hunting you before you could even get away. The poor fuck probably didn't even know what was happening. He probably thought that he was attacked by someone strung out on drugs and didn't think anything of the bite he'd sustained trying to defend himself. It was a damn shame.

I looked back over my shoulder and saw Axel aiming his gun at the zombie in case he tried something funny—honestly, I felt more uncomfortable with Axel aiming that gun near me than I did about the zombie. The gas stopped flowing out the tube and I grabbed the carrier tank, screwing back on the top, my shot gun tucked under my arm as I jogged back to the car. I chucked it in the back towards Kairi and removed the nozzle from the truck's gas tank. It had finished filling a while ago. I jumped back up into the truck's driver seat and restarted the engine, Axel had shut it off while I was siphoning the gas from the other car. Kairi was still sleeping in the back seat and for the first time tonight, I left a stopping place without shooting a zombie or picking up another straggler. I felt accomplished. I drove away, my tank full and more gas stored in the back of my truck—it made me feel much better than it probably should have.

There was quiet in the car, the only thing besides the rumble of the engine was Kairi's heavy breathing. Axel turned the radio on at one point but there was nothing but static and government messages telling people to stay calm and stay home. But we couldn't stay at home—not with all those thing crawling around and my parents out there somewhere. I wasn't going to sit still and wait for those cannibals to come get me.

"It's been hours but it feels like forever." Axel said suddenly, I remained quiet. "One minute, I was sitting in the broadcast room playing shitty pop music and the next, I'm getting calls and texts from my friends wondering if I knew what was going on. They all turned to me, thinking I might know something more, since the government sometimes contacts the station if they need important messages played. But some of my friends contacted me at like, one in the afternoon, wondering if something was going on. I told them nothing had come my way—a few, I thought were playing a practical joke on me. But then, as it got later and later, I got more frantic calls and I started looking all over the internet searching for information. I found a few reports on strange sightings and attacks—they were saying pretty much the same thing on TV. Then the fucking cable goes out and no one knows why. I'm calling the cable help number and no one's answering. My friends who live further away still had cable and were giving me up to the minute updates—up until I left that is. I haven't heard from them in hours.

I couldn't leave the station—I had no car and my apartment's a twenty minute drive. Going outside felt like a fucking suicide mission. I dug up this baseball bat out of the basement but there was literally nothing else. No one else was even at the station today. I started broadcasting about the zombies—a little before they hit our town and people were fucking furious. They kept calling me asking me if this was a joke, if I thought I was fucking funny or something. A half an hour later, I started getting different calls—desperate calls. Calls telling me I was right, calls coming from people as they died, wanting to know if I could help them. Then, Kairi called and you guys came and got me. You saved me—I had nowhere to go. I was probably going to die in that fucking station. I left that message playing on the radio—I hope it helps some people, maybe some people got out early, like us."

I laughed, "Axel, I don't think we got out early. Getting out early would mean we wouldn't be here. Kairi would be with her parents."

"What happened to her parents, I know they're dead but she was so hysterical, I was afraid to really ask her... She didn't really tell me anything about how you and her met up either."

I was quiet for a second, not really sure how much of the story was mine to tell. Within the past ten hours, I'd been involved in so many people's stories, I'd forgotten where mine began and ended. "I was eating dinner when someone crashed through my door. We struggled a bit before I grabbed my mother's antique sword off the wall and stabbed the zombie in the head. A few minutes later, I heard screaming, went and investigated and found Kairi in her room, using her textbook to defend herself. I beheaded the zombie attacking her. Later, I found out a zombie attacked her mother first—her father and her found it. They managed to lock the zombie in a room but her father got bit. He transformed quickly and started attacking Kairi. That's where I came in."

"Her father...? You killed her father in front of her?" Axel asked.

"I had too. What else could I do? Leave her?"

"No, no. I understand now, I'd be hysterical too if my dad attacked me and someone had to kill him to save me." Axel put his hands over his eyes in a tired manner and rubbed them.

"You could go to sleep. I doubt we'll have any trouble driving around here." I said.

"I can't sleep. I don't know how Kairi's sleeping..."

"I think she passed out from exhaustion. She's had a rough night."

I think we both understood that, but neither of us wanted to settle back into the deafening silence that had once been companionable. It almost felt like talking would keep those fucking zombies away. "What about you? You're like fucking Rambo. How do you know how to siphon gas? And these guns—dude, if I had to pick anyone to survive the zombie apocalypse with, it'd be you."

I laughed at this and Kairi mumbled something from the back seat in her sleep. I lowered my voice a little to respond to Axel. "My dad's an ex-Marine, he taught me all this stuff, told me all these stories—I wish I'd paid attention more. My mom's a doctor and her sister is supposed to be having a baby any day now. She lives out in the country and my parents went out to see her, I was left behind."

"So now we're going to them. Makes sense, if they're really out in the country, than there should be minimal zombies, right? Maybe one or two stragglers, but not too many people who can get bitten and turn."

I laughed bitterly at what we'd come to. Trying to stay as far away from other humans as possible, because where there were humans there were zombies and where there was zombies there was death. We'd been traveling for only ten hours but already I felt far too from home and way too far out of my comfort zone. For the first time in ten hours, I allowed myself to think of all the friends and people I knew back home that could very well not be people anymore. But you couldn't think about those kinds of things—those are the kinds of things that'll kill you my dad says and since he managed to live through Desert Storm, I believe him. If anyone knew how to survive something like this it was my dad and he'd spent years trying to impart that knowledge on me. I tried to call my parents again but their phones still went to voicemail. No service.

End Chapter 1

Author's note – This is highly experimental for I think. And depending on how this story is received, that will determine the further actions I take with it. I wrote all 18 pages of this thing like a madman, I really never once stopped to think about what I was writing, I just kept going. It was like I was possessed. I really don't know how many of you care for zombies but to me they're the most likely 'supernatural monster scenario'. Come on, can't you picture a zombie apocalypse more readily than Edward Cullen?

Now, more importantly to most of you, is the romance. Don't worry—this is only chapter one in what looks like a long story. Sora will hopefully show up in the next chapter and make things a little more light hearted.