Welcome to halflife: last lights. Here you will find the stories of Maddie, Arwin, London, Kurt, and Anthony (before he met up with the twins), and possibly others as they try to stay alive after zombies have taken over the Earth. Some stories will be long and multi-chaptered while others will be short and yet others may intertwine. I hope you enjoy.

Maddie walked down the flight of steps as quietly as possible, stepping on the very edge of the fifth to avoid its groan. The living room was dark and shuttered against the outside world and the candle she carried made the house she'd grown up in seem utterly alien. The bulky refrigerator had been pushed against the front door and the windows had been reinforced with pieces of wood from various dressers and cabinets around the house. Occasionally she'd hear a sound from the street and her skin would crawl. Maddie turned past the kitchen and walked down the halls to the back bedrooms. Pictures of brothers and sisters and aunts and uncles they hadn't heard from since the first days of the outbreak stared at her as she passed.

She poked her head inside one room and heard the deep, phlegmy snores of her grandmother coming from the bed. Maddie smiled a wan smile and retreated from the doorway. Her Gran was still fighting but time wasn't on her side. Maddie walked a bit further and rapped on a second door with her knuckles. Her heart jumped into her throat when she didn't get a reply. Her hand dove into the pocket of her sweater and fumbled to grasp the small revolver she carried.

"Mom?" Maddie had cracked the door and now inched her way further into the dark room. The wooden cross on the far wall immediately caught her eye, just as it had for as long as she could remember. "Momma?" her breath momentarily caught in her chest as a powerful stink hit her. "Mom?" she received no reply and stepped fully into the room. The candle cast a flickering glow over her mother's body as she approached the bed.

Maddie bent slightly forward and looked at the jagged bite just above the knee. The flesh had necrotized and black lines radiated from the wound, both up the thigh and down the shin. Maddie followed a line from its source with her eyes and saw that it disappeared underneath the belt that held the ankle against the bed frame. She sighed and fought back tears.

"Madeline? Is that you?" her mother asked in a whisper. She tried to turn her head in her daughter's direction but it was too grand of an effort and she let it fall back against the grimy pillow after getting half way.

"Yeah, it's me, Momma. How are you feeling?"

"So hot. It feels like the devil himself stuck a coal in my insides."

"Don't worry about that, Momma. Dad's out looking for some stronger medicine for you right now." Maddie looked away so she wouldn't see the green and purple circles that were starting to form under her mother's eyes or the bloody scabs cut by the rope that tied each wrist to the headboard.

"Your father is a fool, Maddie. There's no cure for what I have and he should know it." Her body was wracked with a round of coughs like torn cardboard and Maddie almost fell backwards trying to cover her face. "Keeping me like this is just delaying the inevitable and putting you all at risk. I wish I'd never let him talk me into it. He should have let me end it yesterday."

"Don't say that, Momma," Maddie told her mother through the crook of an elbow. "You know what the Church says about...doing that." She dropped her arm slowly and held the candle with both hands.

"Maddie, I think God would understand. If He's still there." Her voice trailed off.

"Dad says they're probably working on a cure right now. You just have to hold on until-"

"Maddie, twenty-eight years of marriage has made your father stupid. I was dead the minute that abomination bit me." She coughed again but this time Maddie didn't flinch. Maddie wiped her mouth with a towel once the spasms were over. "You need to get out of here. You and Liam, your father, too, if he'll leave me."

"But what about Gran? We can't just leave her."

"Maddie, honey, she would understand." Maddie's mother groaned and flexed against her bonds. "Her time was almost up before all this even started. It won't really matter if she gets her pills or not."

"Someone's going to come, Momma. The Army or the Marines."

"If they were going to-can I have a drink, Madeline? I'm so thirsty," she said, changing the subject in mid-stride. "So tired, too."

"Sure, Momma." Maddie picked up the sports bottle and placed the straw at her mother's mouth. She took a long sip and turned away. Seeing her mother like that, trussed to the bed and slowly but surely dying from whatever infection the monster gave her, broke Maddie's heart.

"Thank you." Maddie watched as she settled in and quickly fell asleep again. She replaced the bottle and backed out of the room, quietly closing the door as she went. She retraced her earlier steps through the house and up the steps and joined her brother on the couch.

"How is she?" Liam asked once she sat beside him. The light from the four candles on the coffee table gave him a haunted face.

"Sleeping now. She woke up for a little bit while I was in there."

"Do you think she's going to, you know?"

"Soon." Her brother looked away.

"What are we going to do?"

"I don't know, Liam. I don't know if we can stay here much longer."

"Dad said we're safe here," the boy told her.

"I know, Liam, but we don't have much food left and it's almost too dangerous to go out and find more with all those...things out there." She reached into her sweater and carefully pulled the gun out. Liam flinched and recoiled as far as he could against the upholstery until Maddie had pointed the barrel away from them and set it on the scuffed table.

"When is Dad going to come back?" Liam asked after a few minutes of silence. His hands turned the small walkie-talkie over and over in his lap. He looked at it, willing it to utter a sound.

"Soon, I'm sure. He said he was going to check out a few of the shops a couple of streets over to try to find some stuff to help Mom and Gran." Maddie bit down hard on her worry and kept it out of her voice by a sheer act of will.

"He should have let me go with him. I could have helped him."

"You might have, Liam," Maddie said diplomatically, "but you also might not have."

"How?" The indignation in her brother's voice was so strong she could almost taste it.

"If he doesn't have to worry about you being okay he can move faster. He knows you're here, safe, so that's one less thing he has to think about while keeping away from those things."

"I can look after myself, Maddie," Liam told her. "I'm not a little kid."

"I know, Liam, I know. But you know how Dad is. He'll still worry about you when you're fifty." The optimism about the future in her voice surprised Maddie but it seemed to soothe Liam's ruffled feathers. He glanced at her and she caught a hint of a smile as he thought about her words. She was about to say something else when the walkie chirped twice.

Liam jumped so hard that it nearly tumbled out of his hands. He pressed the button twice and raised it to his ear to listen. He clamped his free hand over his other ear and furrowed his brow as he tried to listen. "Okay, we'll be ready," he finally said and put it down on table. He looked over at Maddie and they were at the window seconds later.

Directly under the second story window was the the roof that covered the dining room and kitchen. Liam pushed back the curtains and, after a quick peek at the dark streets and alleys, pushed the glass upward. He stuck his left leg out, ducked his head, and swung his right leg through as well, leaving him sitting on the window sill. He hopped the eighteen inches to the first floor roof and began lowering the ladder to the ground below.

"Do you see him yet?" Maddie whispered from the window.

"No, but he's got to be close. Wait, there he is." Liam finished maneuvering the ladder just as his father came around a corner and labored across the last twenty feet. He held on to the top of the ladder as his father jumped and caught a rung just over halfway up. Liam reached out a hand and did his best to pull his dad up the ladder as quickly as possible.

"Thanks, buddy," the man said as he slung a bulging bag from his shoulders. "Hand this to your sister and tell her to dump it out and give it back as fast as she can." Liam did as he was told even though his eyes were full of questions. He waddled to the window with the heavy bag and relayed their father's orders, pushing the bottom of the bag up and over the sill while Maddie pulled. He heard things falling on the floor and he bounced on his toes anxiously while he waited for Maddie to shove the bag back out the window. Long seconds passed before it was back in his fingers and he raced back to his father's beckoning hands.

"You're not going back out, are you?" he asked as the man slipped the sack over a shoulder.

"I have to, Liam," his father told him as he knelt down and put a hand on his son's shoulder. "I found a shop that hasn't been looted yet and there's enough food there to last us a month if we're careful. I got a bunch of it but I have to go back for the rest before someone else does."

"Did you find any medicine?"

"No, son, I didn't." He sounded crestfallen and he swallowed hard before he could continue. "There's a little drugstore across the street from where I got the food. I'll check there before I come back."

"Let me go with you," Liam begged. "I can grab the food while you look for the medicine."

"Liam, I need you here. I need you to watch out for your sister, okay?"

"Okay," Liam nodded after a second. What was he going to do here? It scared him to death to be in the same room as the gun and Maddie was much more level-headed and reliable than he was. He started to protest but the look in his father's eyes told him it wasn't up for discussion.

"Thanks, buddy. I'll feel better knowing that you're on guard here." He leaned in and kissed Liam on the top of the head. "I'll be back soon. Pull the ladder up once I'm down, okay?" he slid back down the ladder and Liam's eyes followed him until he was lost in the shadows of the night. He stood with the top rung of the ladder in his hands for a moment, feeling a mixture of worry and condescension.

Liam struggled but finally managed to pull the ladder back up onto the roof, falling on his rear after a final tug. He dusted himself off and ran to the window and pulled himself inside. His muscles were burning but he forgot the pain as he saw the pile of food his sister was sorting.

"Good grief," he said as he looked over the haul, "what all did he get?"

"A little bit of everything from what I can tell so far," his sister told him as she put three sausages off to one side with a deviled ham and a few cans of potted meat. "Dad must have got into the deli over near Fenway."

"Fenway? That's six blocks away. There must be thousands of those things between our house and there."

Maddie instantly regretted uttering those words when she saw the alarm spread across her brother's face. "I might be wrong. This could have come from that little place on Market."

"No, Dad said he checked there a few days ago and it had been cleaned out." Liam fell silent as he went to the far end of the couch and sat down.

"He's going to be fine, Liam. Dad's a smart man. He'll be careful and he's already been there once tonight so he'll know what to watch out for."

"I guess," he answered, not sounding remotely convinced.

"You'll see. He'll be back before you know it."

Three hours later the candles had burned almost completely down and he wasn't back. Liam was on edge and had nearly worked himself into hysterics. Maddie watched as he paced back and forth in front of the window holding the walkie-talkie in his hands like a talisman. "Liam, please come back over here," she asked after he had frozen in place with his face peeking through the corner of the curtain.

"I'm waiting for Dad, Maddie," he replied in the same monotone he'd been using for the last hour. That voice was beginning to scare her. It sounded like all the emotion had been bleached from it and it made the hair on the back of her neck stand on end.

"C'mon, Liam. Let's eat something. What do you want?"

"I want Dad back here right now. That's what I want."

"I do, too, but he'll be back. I know he will. He probably hunkered down for the night since it's going on three in the morning."

"He should have called to tell us so we wouldn't worry about him. I want to talk to him." He raised the small device to his mouth and had his thumb over the button.

"Don't, Liam," she said, putting her sisterly authority into her voice.

"Why not?" he demanded.

"He might be hiding right now and you might give him away if you do."

"I thought you said he was hunkering down for the night," he said accusingly.

"He probably is, but it's possible. I don't think we should risk it." She put a look of earnestness on her face and assuredness into her voice and seemed to win him over. "Come over here and eat with me. I know you have to be hungry and I think there's some cookies over here somewhere." He was still a year or two from becoming an eating machine but he had always been able to be tempted with sweets. An image of Zack standing by her old candy counter fluttered through her head and she felt a pang of sadness. How were they? Had Carey make it back and got them out? Had-

"-Oreos."

"Huh? What'd you say, Liam?"

"I said I'd like some Oreos."

"Oh, sure. We have some of those," Maddie said as she was yanked back to the present. "They're...where'd I see them? Come help me look." She glanced up and was surprised to see her brother leaving his spot by the window to join her. That was good.

They found the blue package and Liam fumbled with it for a moment before ripping the end open and spilling the cookies on the floor. Their eyes met at the shockingly loud sound before jumping to the window. After straining to hear anything out of the ordinary for a few seconds, they returned their attention to the cookies.

Liam inhaled three before she could eat one and Maddie briefly considered slowing him down since Oreos had become an endangered species over the last week but before she could speak, the fact that so had they crossed her mind and she swallowed the words and let him enjoy the cookies.

When he finally sat back from the remaining few Oreos a few minutes later, Liam had a mustache of black crumbs across his upper lip. "Those were good, Maddie. I'm going to miss them when there aren't any more," he told her, eerily echoing her earlier thoughts.

"We'll have more one day."

"I hope so." He reached out a hand for one last cookie but it froze when an inhuman growl reached them through the floorboards. His eyes widened in shock as he yanked his hand back to his lap. "What was that?" Maddie thought she knew but couldn't answer him. It became a moot point when Liam read her face as she tried to form the words.

"Liam..."

"It's Mom, right? She died and became one of them, right?" His eyes became wet and tears washed clean streaks down his dirty cheeks. "It's not fair." Another low growl answered him.

"I know, Liam. It's not fair at all." She scooted over and wrapped her arms around her brother. He stiffened at first but relaxed and leaned into her as sobs wracked his body. She held him and gently stroked his hair until he quieted down some time later. The sounds from downstairs came and went and varied in intensity and she did her best to ignore them but they still ate away at her sanity.

"Where are you going?" he asked, startling her as she began extricating herself from around him.

"I thought you were asleep."

"No, I wasn't sleeping. I wish I was, though. That way I could wake up from all this."

"Me too," she admitted as she got to her feet. Liam watched as she walked the short distance to the table and picked up the pistol.

"Are you going to...?" he couldn't finish the question.

"Yes. I have to. Mom would want it that way. She wouldn't want to be one of those things."

"I'll do it," he said suddenly, surprising her.

"No, I'll do it. I'm older."

"Dad's older than you."

Liam's logic was sound but she discarded it while also tamping down on her own growing worry. "You're right, but Dad's not back yet and he shouldn't have to do it either. She was...is...his wife. That wouldn't be right." She hesitated in case her brother had more to say but he didn't. Liam simply nodded and stood up.

"I'm coming with you."

"You will wait in the hall," she told him. "You don't need to see this." He nodded again and fell into step behind her as they descended the stairs. Maddie paused once they reached her parents' bedroom, steeling herself against the sounds coming from within and for what she was about to do. Slow, deep breaths calmed her nerves. She tightened her grip on the pistol with one hand and twisted the door's knob with the other. "Stay here," she reminded him.

"I will." Maddie opened the door and quickly stepped through, taking care to block any view of the snarling thing on the bed from her brother. She closed the door and inched her way across the carpet to the bed.

Enough moonlight filtered through the makeshift window bars to fully show the horror her mother had become. The formerly kind and loving eyes had become glazed and murderous. Her soft hands had contracted into bent claws. Maddie nearly panicked and ran out of the room when the corpse lurched against its restraints. Once the thing realized it couldn't reach her, it curled its lips back and settled for gnashing its teeth.

"I'm so sorry, Momma," she said softly. "So sorry." She raised the pistol and looked down the barrel, remembering her father's instructions to the letter. Maddie widened her stance and braced the gun with her other hand. She slipped her finger inside the trigger guard and rested it lightly against the smooth metal.

"I love you. I always will," she whispered. Maddie swallowed hard and pulled the trigger.