 
Refuge: Tales from a Zombie Apocalypse

by Anthea Strezze

Copyright © 2012 Anthea Strezze

Smashwords Edition

Cover created by Anthea Strezze using art licensed from "Teenbull" via Dreamstime.com.

Discover other titles by Anthea Strezze at Smashwords.

The Trouble With Wishes

Refuge: Tales from a Zombie Apocalypse

Zombie Variations

For the author's blog, visit http://antheastrezze.com/blog/.

The following is a work of fiction, and all names, places, characters and events are products of the author's imagination or have been used fictitiously. Any resemblance to real locales, events, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

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Dedicated to my ever-supportive, ever-patient, and ever-beloved Brian, and to Triel, who provided feline supervision for the writing of these stories.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Henry

Monsters

Dreamtime

Thou Shalt Not Kill

Corpse Pose

A Time to Laugh

Life Goes On

More Titles by Anthea Strezze

About the Author

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## Henry

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Verity leaned against the wall and took a deep breath of the cool morning air.

It was crowded inside the old parish hall, even with the town's population decimated by the new flu. Everyone left alive was gathered there, doing what they could to help each other, even an old woman like her with bad knees. In a few minutes, she would go back to helping serve breakfast, but for now it was nice to have a moment to herself. A moment to push back the tears that kept threatening to surface. She wouldn't be the only one crying, if she gave in, but she'd feel guilty, crying for one old man when so many others were dead too.

She was about to push away from the wall when a familiar, impossible, figure in the street caught her eye. "Henry?" she called, her heart suddenly pounding like it would beat its way out of her body. Her breath caught in her throat and she leaned back against the wall, one hand against her chest.

"Verity? Are you all right?"

It was Silvia again. Normally Verity would brush her off and resent her for hovering, but this time she welcomed the young widow's steadying hand. "H-Henry," she said, pointing.

Silvia didn't bother to look, trying instead to coax her inside. "It can't be Henry, dear. Now why don't you come inside and sit down. We don't want to lose you too."

"But look!" He might be walking more stiffly than usual, but it was Henry, her Henry, coming down the street just as if he hadn't been laid out in the high school gym with the other dead three days ago.

Finally Silvia glanced over, and then did a double-take that turned her whole body around. "It can't be," she whispered. "Edgar," she called, turning back to the open door. "Edgar!"

The panic in her shout brought more people spilling out of the hall, all of whom froze at the sight of the figures shambling slowly down the street.

"Zombies," one of the teenagers said, his voice trembling.

"Everybody inside, now! We can barricade the doors and windows, and keep them out." Edgar started pushing people back inside, even as more tried to get out to see what was going on. "Get inside! Now!"

"Henry," Verity whispered. She pushed herself away from the wall and paused to make sure she was steady on her feet, then sidled to the edge of the crowd. She moved slowly, trying not to catch anyone's attention. The others wouldn't understand, and wouldn't allow what she was planning if they realized it.

She worked her way out to the teenagers who were standing a few feet down the walk, staring at the oncoming figures and talking softly amongst themselves. "Go on in now," she said firmly, patting the nearest boy's arm. "They'll need you inside. Go on."

The boys exchanged looks, but didn't move until Edgar shouted at them. "Get in here! We need a defensible position, not empty heroics!"

A month ago, they might have ignored him, but Edgar had been the glue that kept their community together when the flu hit, making sure the sick and shellshocked were taken care of instead of leaving them to die on their own, or waiting for someone else to step in.

A someone else who still hadn't come.

The boys still hesitated, but with an extra nudge from Verity, they started moving.

So did Verity, but in the opposite direction. She had heard all about zombies, back before the flu. She had even enjoyed some of the movies. She knew what everyone was thinking, but this was the real world, not a movie. And that was Henry, her Henry.

Even if the price of holding him one more time was her life, she was more than willing to pay it.

She walked briskly down the street, ignoring the shouts behind her and the arthritis in her knees with equal determination.

Henry had stopped moving, and seemed to be watching her come. There were others on the street, too, but she only had eyes for him. "Oh, Henry," she said when she reached him at last. She didn't hesitate, just slipped her arms around him, resting her head against his chest.

Cold arms wrapped around her, and she was home.

***

She wanted that to be the end.

But time didn't stand still, and her heart didn't conveniently stop in that one perfect moment before she realized that something was wrong.

His arms, holding her, weren't just cold. They fell along her back at a different angle than when Henry held her. And where Henry had always bent his head to press his cheek against hers, now he rested his chin lightly on top of her head. Those and dozens of other tiny differences told her she wasn't just embracing a corpse, she was holding a complete stranger.

She didn't let go, though. After all, who could need a hug more than someone who had just woken up inside a stranger's dead body?

"There, there," she found herself murmuring. "It'll be all right. I don't know how, dear, but it'll be all right."

The cold arms around her tightened painfully, then fell away.

She looked up into his face, trying to smile even as the tears streamed down her face and made it hard to see, and he looked back at her, the stranger using her husband's eyes. Then he reached out a hand and pushed her, with a gentle but firm nudge, in the direction of the parish hall.

She raised one hand in a half-hearted wave, and walked away.

She didn't look back, not even when fearsome moans and groans rang out from behind her. She wasn't sure she could have seen anything through the tears anyway.

The door opened as she reached it, and Silvia stood there, a blanket held ready to wrap her in and a look of such hope on her face that it chilled Verity to the bone.

"No," she told the younger woman, shaking her head. "It isn't them. Not my Henry, not your family." A sob shook her, at the loss of her own brief hope. "I don't know who," she said, her voice choked with tears, "but that wasn't my Henry at all."

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## Monsters

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Lanie opened her eyes, suddenly awake, but not sure why.

Keller had bragged about how secure his bunker was, but now she wondered how accurate his claims were. She sat up, looking around and straining her eyes to catch any faint contrast or sense of motion in the dark.

Nothing.

She had never experienced true darkness before the disaster. A city girl, she was used to having enough light seeping through the blinds at night that she could easily navigate her apartment in the "dark." Now, though...

She held her breath, trying to hear any faint scuffs or creaks, but Keller's gentle snore seemed like an airplane engine in comparison to the quiet night. She jabbed him viciously in the ribs.

He snorted a little, groaned, and sat up, holding his own breath for a moment. "What is it?" he asked, while she was still straining to hear.

"I don't know," she whispered.

She heard him get up, and waited.

"I can't see anything on the scope," he said, returning to the pallet and fumbling around. "I'll take a flashlight and a crowbar, and check outside."

Lanie grabbed his arm, holding him down with all her body weight. "No! Every horror movie I've ever seen tells me that's a bad idea."

He let out a long sigh, putting the flashlight aside and lying down next to her. "Fine, then I'm going back to sleep. Wake me if the door caves in." A moment later, he was snoring again.

Lanie hugged her knees and stared into the darkness, hoping that whatever had woken her up couldn't break in.

She dozed. She couldn't help but doze after the long day they had spend getting there, and the long night since.

The dream started innocently enough. An idyllic market scene, her mood peaceful, even serene. The people around her were speaking Chinese, but somehow she knew their meaning. "Good morning!" "How much is this fish?" "How is your mother?" "I'll take two." The sort of thing she might have heard at the farmer's market in town, before.

Then in a flash of light, everyone fell down dead. Everyone! Bending down to examine one of the bodies, she even saw a bee lying dead on his shirt. Not just everyone, but everything was dead, and silence reigned. She leaned closer, looking into the stranger's face, feeling a sort of distant sorrow. What had happened? Why was she still alive?

The man's eyes snapped open, and his face twisted into a mask of fury. "How dare you?" he shouted. "Why do you get to live?"

Lanie startled awake, gasping for air and staring around in the darkness. She couldn't turn on the lantern, she couldn't! They would see the light, and know she was there.

Fear jittered along her nerves, followed by a shudder and a horrible conviction. They already knew she was there, just as she knew they were there. And they were angry. She could practically feel their anger beating against her skin.

She sat up and set her back against the wall, facing the deadlocked and barred door. She couldn't face the deeper sleep that might come with lying down again. _Just a nightmare_ , she told herself. _Treat it like a normal nightmare. Why China?_ She had been self-analyzing her nightmares for a long time before the disaster, and it was second nature to start asking the questions, and using them to dull her emotional response.

In her mind, she saw the man's face again, and shuddered at the fury in his voice. _Let's see. China is foreign, China is a rival, if not an enemy._ And there had been rumors that China was preparing for an attack, before the disaster. The Chinese government had blamed the US for the virulent bird flu that was sweeping the globe, even though the initial outbursts in three major US cities had clearly been a terrorist attack.

I feel like the zombies are foreign. That the undead are foreign to the living. And they're definitely enemies.

The thought triggered the memory of that morning, and she shivered.

Had it really been less than a day?

Over the past few weeks, she had already nursed both parents and a cousin to their final rests, so when her uncle died in the night, it was neither a surprise nor a novelty. She called the hotline, and in the morning a doctor and three volunteers showed up to take care of the body. But then while the doctor was doing the obligatory check for vital signs, her uncle sat up, grabbed the doctor by the throat, and squeezed until her body went limp.

Two of the volunteers rushed to restrain him, while the third dropped to his knees by the doctor to start CPR. Lanie ran for her gun.

A perfect head shot had only slowed her uncle's body down, and by then the doctor was attacking too, and one of the volunteers was dead. While she wavered, unsure of where to aim next, the dead volunteer rose and lurched into the man who the doctor and her uncle were already attacking. The third volunteer grabbed her arm and dragged her out of the room, out of the house.

Sitting in his truck with the doors locked, watching the dead come shambling out into the street, he told her about his bunker, and she told him to drive...

She stared in the general direction of his snore now, and wondered what she had been thinking, coming out to the middle of nowhere with a complete stranger. _I should have just gone to the public shelter_ , she thought. Instead, she ran off with a stranger and practically tore his clothes off as soon as they were safe. What her mother would say... was her mother a zombie now too?

She shivered, and tried to redirect her thoughts. _What I need right now is a movie. A funny, happy movie._ She closed her eyes tight, envisioning cartoon balloons, and relaxed into a happier memory.

Memory turned into dream, but she didn't realize she was sleeping. She was floating, flying over a city, and then she was down in the street, watching people rushing about their business. A woman in a crisp suit caught her eye, and she followed her. Lanie knew, in the way of dreams, that the young woman was on her way to a very important meeting, and that if things went well she would be getting a promotion and a raise, and her parents would be able to keep their farm a little longer.

There was a flash of light, and the woman fell, her body deforming with a wet squelch as it hit the ground. Lanie looked around for help, but everyone else had fallen in the same instant. No one was moving in the street except for her. She wanted to help, but all she could do was stand there, surrounded by death.

Suddenly, they were face to face, the woman's eyes open and accusing. "You killed us!" she shouted. "Now you'll die too!"

Lanie jerked awake, her head hitting the wall as the words echoed in her mind. _A dream_ , she told herself, her eyes open so wide they were starting to hurt. _Another nightmare._

Trying not to pant, she felt her way over to the scope and peered out, but all she could see was more black night. She would have to wait until morning. In the meantime, some part of her mind was utterly convinced that they were surrounded, that the woods around the bunker were filled with the angry dead. _The angry Chinese dead_ , she thought, mocking herself. _I guess I should be glad I'm not dreaming about my family._

She shuddered, sure that now her next nightmare would be just that. She blinked, hard, and shifted her weight, debating the best way to stay awake. The bunker was built of cinderblocks and rebar, though the inside was nicely finished. The ceiling was more of the same, but also had thick glass blocks that would let in daylight once the sun rose. She could wait until then to sleep.

For the rest of the night she stood, sometimes leaning against the wall, sometimes pacing in the dark, trying to shake the conviction that she could feel zombies gathering outside. When light first started to seep through the skylight, she thought it was her imagination, but then she realized that - finally! - it was dawn.

She went eagerly to the scope, but instead of trees and brush saw nothing. It was blocked.

Her stomach sank, and she tried hard not to panic as she backed away and returned to her spot against the wall. _It doesn't have to be a zombie blocking the scope_ , she tried to tell herself, but her mind's eye supplied a vision of dozens of zombies, standing quietly outside the bunker, waiting for the door to open.

She sat down, trying to take comfort in the faint sunlight while Keller snored and the zombies waited.

She was still sitting, holding her knees and staring into space, when Keller finally woke up.

He stretched, and smiled at her. "So, any zombies out there, now that it's light out?"

"Yes. At least a dozen." Even as she said it, she felt guilty for sounding so certain. After all, she hadn't actually seen anything.

Keller went over to the scope and swore. "I can't see anything - something's blocking the scope."

"One of them."

He peered out again, then gave her a suspicious look. "You know that, or you think it?"

She hesitated just a moment too long, and he shook his head. "Look, I know you're scared. So am I, after what we went through yesterday! But you can't just assume that because the scope's blocked there are zombies. We're in the middle of nowhere, probably miles from the nearest town, so where would they even come from?"

Lanie grimaced. He had a point, but still... "Maybe they followed us."

"Look," Keller said after a moment. "I'll go outside and check. If it's a zombie covering the scope, I'll kill it, and if it's not, I'll clear whatever it is off."

He grabbed a crowbar and reached for the deadbolt.

"I don't think that's a good idea," Lanie said, her skin crawling.

"Relax." He turned the lock.

The sound of the deadbolt unlocking triggered a surge of nervous sensation that sent Lanie scrambling, all thought of proof and rationality gone. She grabbed her gun, disengaged the safety, and pointed it at Keller.

"Lock. That. Door," she said, her voice shaking. Her hands were steady, though.

Keller turned the lock again, re-engaging the deadbolt. "You need to calm down," he said, leaving his hand on the lock.

"You need to keep that door closed," she said. "It's not just one zombie, and if you open that door, you'll let them in. They're waiting, right outside." Suddenly, it didn't matter if it was possible or not. She could feel their anger, throbbing on the edge of her awareness and fraying her own temper bare.

***

Keller was starting to wonder what he had gotten himself into. It had seemed like the most natural thing in the world to retreat to his Granddad's bunker when the dead suddenly started walking, especially with so many people dead of the bird flu in recent weeks. And of course he had invited the girl to come along. She was gorgeous, and besides, she had a gun. He just hadn't expected to find that gun pointed at him.

"Lanie... With the scope covered, there's no way you can know that."

She had seemed so sane and levelheaded the day before, even joking about redneck zombies once they got away from their disastrous stop at the gas station. He grinned, hoping to call out that sense of humor again. "Besides," he said in a light tone of voice, "why would they be waiting there for us? It's not like zombies are smart. Right? They haven't got any brains anymore, so they want ours. Braaaains..." He held his arms out like a sleep walker, rolling his eyes.

The gun didn't waver, and she didn't look amused. "Maybe they're not as brainless as movie zombies," she said. "All I know is they're out there, and if you try to open that door again, I will shoot you."

He took a deep breath and let it out again, slowly placing the crowbar back on the floor. "If you kill me, I'll turn into one of them," he said, holding up his hands. "And neither of us wants that, right?"

"Neither of us wants me to cripple you either, but I'll do it if I have to."

Keller looked around the tiny bunker, but his grandfather had stocked it with supplies for disaster survival, not crazy lady survival. Although...

"Chocolate!"

"Excuse me?" Lanie looked ready to shoot him even if he didn't try to open the door.

He smiled as charmingly as he could. "There's got to be some chocolate in the stockpile. Would you like some?"

"I am not PMSing, you idiot. I'm serious. I don't know how I know, but I know that they're out there. That's what woke me up last night. I could feel them arriving."

Keller set his back to the wall and slid down it to sit on the floor, careful not to make any move that might startle her. "All right," he said. "So we wait them out. It's nice to go outside for fresh supplies, and to empty the can, but my granddad stocked this place well enough that we don't have to go outside for months, if it comes to that. 'Course, he was worried about commies rather than zombies, but the food's the same either way."

Lanie glanced around and frowned, her brow crinkling in a way that made him nervous.

"So," he said, trying to keep her mind off shooting him. "How long do you think they'll wait?"

Lanie pursed her lips and lowered the gun, letting it point at the ground. Keller didn't relax, though. Ricochets could still kill, and he wouldn't be happy until the safety was on, at least.

"You believe me?" she asked.

How to play it? There was no telling just how unstable she was. If he agreed too readily, she might decide he was plotting something and shoot him preemptively.

"I'm willing to stay inside on the off chance that you're right," he said, honestly. "At least until the scope clears and we can get visual confirmation. If it's just debris, the wind should blow it off eventually."

"All right," Lanie said, flipping the safety on. Keller let out a quiet sigh of relief.

"I wasn't sure I believed it myself until you went for that lock," she went on. "Then, I had the gun pointed at you before I could even think. This... knowing is too strong for me to ignore. It's like knowing that jumping off a skyscraper will kill you. Right now, opening that door would be just as deadly."

Keller couldn't help thinking that a madwoman with a gun was equally dangerous, but at least the safety was on. He looked around, feeling a little desperate, and a pile of card boxes caught his eye. He racked his brain, trying to remember the rules for poker, hearts, anything...

"So," he said after a moment, trying to keep his voice light. "Go fish?"

The morning passed slowly, and Keller wasn't sure if playing cards made it better or even more interminable. He was down to two cards in their third game when Lanie suddenly perked up, looked at the wall, and said, "Look out the scope. Now!"

She still had the gun, so he complied.

The first thing he saw was the figure walking away. "Huh." After a moment, he decided to admit it. "You were right. It was a zombie covering the scope."

"And the others?"

He shifted his head to the side to get a different view, then spun away from the scope and set his back to the wall, trying not to vomit at the thought of how close he had come to walking out into that horde. "You were right," he whispered, after he got his voice under control.

"Can you see why they're leaving?" Lanie asked.

He shook his head, unable to deal with looking at that many zombies right now.

Lanie rolled her eyes and got up to look for herself. "I can't... tell," she said thoughtfully after a moment. Then she shuddered and backed away.

Keller nodded. He had seen at least twenty in his quick glance. The idea that they were gathering together in hordes like in the movies unnerved him.

It seemed Lanie was made of sterner stuff, though. She returned to the scope, peering intently out at the horde.

"Aren't you going to say 'I told you so?'" he asked.

She didn't bother to respond.

***

Lanie watched until the dead were out of sight, and then she watched some more. She couldn't get it out of her mind, the way that one zombie had turned and looked at her, _at her_ , as if there was no scope or wall in the way.

Finally, though, she had to accept that there was nothing more to see for the moment.

"I think they're smarter than we've been giving them credit for," she said, turning away from the scope to face Keller. "They knew we were in here, otherwise why stay so long, and why cover the scope?"

"Are they gone?" he asked. "Maybe we should get out of here, before they come back."

"I told you - they're smarter than you think. They may be waiting for us to do exactly that, just out of sight."

"But... they don't move fast. As long as we have a head start, we can outrun them."

"Outrun them to where?" She shook her head. Being stuck in the bunker with zombies surrounding them had sucked, but at least they seemed to be safe. Abandoning that to go running off willy-nilly seemed like a bad idea. "Do you have a plan?" she asked. "And what if they surround us? Then it won't matter how fast we run."

"So... what? Just stay here, forever?" Keller's voice cracked, and he looked like he was going to cry.

Lanie wasn't sure whether she wanted to comfort him or smack him. "I thought that was your plan when you invited me here. You said you had it stocked for the apocalypse, and we could stay here for years if we needed to."

Keller squirmed. "I might have... exaggerated a bit."

"But... you've got extra storage somewhere, right?" She had assumed, when they first arrived, based on what he had told her. What she could see right now might last three weeks, but definitely not years.

"What you see is what you get," he said. "Three or four months, tops." He shrugged, and peered out the scope again. "I didn't think we'd need more than that."

"You lied to me!"

"No I didn't."

"You said you had this place stocked for years when you talked me into coming here with you. Now you're saying months, but unless there's something you haven't shown me, we've got weeks. Tops." She spat the last word back at him. They glared at each other a moment, then she shook her head and sighed. "What were you thinking?"

"Mainly, I was thinking we needed to get out of there. And this place was actually my granddad's. He died a couple of months ago - before the flu outbreak. He left this to me, and I thought, you know, that it might be a good vacation place if I fixed it up. But then the flu hit, and then your uncle... I mean, it just seemed like the obvious place to go. Serendipity, and all that."

She looked around at the supplies and sighed again. "I'm an idiot... I should have just gone to the official shelter. That high school was already practically a fortress, and they had all the relief supplies there."

Keller scoffed. "Yeah, like they're not down to sizing each other up for breakfast by now. If they're not all zombies themselves... I mean, cities are always deathtraps in all the movies."

"Movies!"

"What else do we have to go on?"

Lanie kicked one of the bins and went back to the scope, trying to pretend she was actually interested in looking at the trees. She stiffened when Keller wrapped his arms around her from behind, but relaxed a little when he didn't do anything else.

After a few minutes of standing still together, she leaned back against him and relaxed a bit more.

"I'm sorry," Keller said, talking into her hair. "I know this hasn't turned out the way either of us thought it would, but I think it's important to admit that neither of us were prepared for a real zombie apocalypse."

Lanie snorted a laugh. "I don't think either of us was even prepared for a perfectly mundane bird flu apocalypse."

"Right," he said. "So nobody's really been playing with a full deck for at least a month, since we realized just how bad things were going to get with the pandemic. Then add the dead rising up and recruiting the living to join their ranks, and... I think we're doing the best we can."

Lanie nodded, and stepped away from him, looking around the room again. "I think the first thing we should do is take an inventory," she said. "Figure out exactly what we've got, and what we can do with it."

"We might be able to cannibalize something useful from the truck, too. Like in those survival shows. I know I don't want to try another filling station, and she was down to fumes by the time we got here. I don't even know if she'll start again."

"Survival shows?" Lanie quirked an eyebrow at him.

"You know, like..." He rattled off a few names. "I like that one the best," he said of the last show on his list. "With that one, you know he's actually out there, actually doing everything. There was this one time..."

Lanie held up a hand to stop him, trying not to laugh at his enthusiasm. "I think my dad watched some of the same shows. So what did you do before all this? Any survival experience?"

He shrugged, grimacing. "Computer programmer. I'm not even sure I can start a fire without matches."

"I can probably start a fire with flint and steel, if we find some in the inventory. Did you say this place was stocked by your grandfather? Or was some of this you?"

"Mostly him. I took a weekend to come see it, after I found out, but all I brought was an extra case of bottled water."

"Water is good. I'm not going to complain about water." Suiting actions to words, she opened a bottle and took a sip. Then she opened a storage bin and started pulling everything out.

"So what were you? Before?"

"Kindergarten teacher."

"Seriously?" She didn't respond. "Sorry. I know a lot of kids have died. It just surprised me - you shoot really well for a kindergarten teacher."

"Dad was a libertarian," she said, trying not to think about her former students. "He believed very firmly that it was every citizen's responsibility to own a gun and know how to use it."

Keller didn't respond, and Lanie felt relieved. Even though she had started it, the discussion of their old lives was just too painful. Too many people were dead. If he realized that, maybe they could get along long-term, after all.

"Do you think the kids came back as zombies too?"

Lanie shuddered at the thought, and glared at him. "I can still shoot you, you know."

"Sorry!"

They completed the inventory in relative silence, and by the time they were done, the urge to shoot him had faded. Her temper no longer felt so frayed either, and she actually laughed when he caught her eye again and made a face.

"So, about two months' worth of food and water, and some decent survival equipment," she said. "It's better than I thought."

She didn't mention the boxes of condoms that they had found, but she was glad to see them. There was no way she wanted to get pregnant in this situation, but she wasn't really interested in becoming celibate either. Keller hadn't mentioned them either, though he watched her stack them by the bed.

"Still not a lot," he said instead. "We're going to need some sort of a plan."

"Well, we've got the radio now." They had found one of the fancy hand-crank emergency radios in the third supply bin. "I say, let's crank it up and see what's going on in the world outside."

Keller cranked for a few minutes, then turned it on and started fiddling with the dials. There was nothing but static.

"The grid might have gone down," he said. "And the emergency generators..."

Lanie reached past him and turned it off. "Between the bird flu and the zombies, there might not be anyone in a position to turn them on. I think for now, though, we have to assume we're on our own."

"Yeah." Keller looked depressed. "I mean really, our government couldn't even deal with Hurricane Katrina, so why should we expect them to be able to deal with zombies?"

Lanie nodded. "The relief shipments were working out pretty well, but those were mostly private efforts. Businesses sending their supplies to the people who could use them, that sort of thing."

"Mainly employees, I heard. People who decided to do the right thing even if they didn't technically have the authority. But now..."

"I know. Now they don't just have disease to worry about. Any time a driver stops for gas, or tries to make a delivery, they're going to get attacked."

"A lot of people are going to start starving."

They looked around the bunker with new eyes, suddenly seeing largesse instead of hardship.

Keller shook his head. "There's no way we can get this to anybody. The truck's out of gas, so we'd be down to what we can carry, and we don't have any way to find other survivors, other than wandering around. We'd just get ourselves killed."

"I know," Lanie said. "But if we can't share it, we might as well use it. We'll make up two packs, with as many supplies as we can comfortably carry. We set them aside as our go-bags, and we stay here until we've used up all the rest of it. Maybe by then there'll be a signal on the radio, or the zombies will be gone. If not, we still set out, start looking for other survivors, or someplace we can stay longer term."

Keller was nodding. "It'll be warmer then too. More edible plants to gather, less need for shelter from the weather. I know it's cold in here, but it'd be even worse out in the wind."

Lanie swung open the door of the wood stove in the corner, peering in. "Does this thing work? I mean, if the zombies have already found us here, we don't need to worry about attracting their attention with the smoke, so we might as well be warm. And all this canned stuff might be more appetizing if we can heat it up."

"We'd have to go outside for wood..."

Lanie looked around at the walls, trying to listen for that sense that had warned her of the zombies before. "Do you trust me?" she asked.

Keller just raised his eyebrows.

She took a deep breath and turned the deadbolt, then unlocked the door and opened it cautiously.

They stepped outside, looking around, and Keller made a quick walk around the perimeter of the bunker's little grove. Nothing attacked, so they cautiously started gathering dead branches and building a wood pile.

"I don't know about you," Lanie said after a little while, "but every time I go out of sight of the door, I get so nervous I have to hurry back."

"Are you sensing zombies?" Keller straightened, hatchet in hand, and scanned the woods.

"No... no, I don't think so." She grimaced. "I think it's the fact that it's unlocked. In the city, I never used to leave anything unlocked. Not my car, not my apartment, not even to take the garbage out! It just... makes me uneasy."

"Well, that's easy enough. We'll just lock it every time we leave."

"But then what if we're in a hurry when we get back? It took you like five minutes to get the door open the first time, and I didn't see any WD-40 in our inventory."

Keller was silent for a few minutes, staring at the door and looking around.

"The wood pile," he said eventually. "We build it up next to the bunker so that we can easily climb up on the roof, and leave the shovel and the broom up there so we can knock it down if zombies try to climb up after us. That way, if we're in a rush and can't get in, we can still get to safety fast."

"That... works," Lanie said. "I guess. But I think we should store our go-bags and the tent up there too, so that if we do get cornered and the zombies take a while to go away, we still have food and shelter. We can wrap everything in one of the tarps, so it's safe from the weather, and that'll give us a little more space for an inside wood pile, too."

Building the wood pile tall enough and sturdy enough took three days, during which they both grew more confident of Lanie's ability to sense zombies from a distance. Twice, they stopped work and sheltered inside the bunker when she warned of zombies coming their way.

Each time, Keller asked her non-stop questions while he watched out the scope - how far away they were, how fast they were moving, how many there were, and their exact direction.

Answering the questions made Lanie focus her attention on the sense, not just taking a first warning from it, but learning to distinguish details and extend her range. "It's like those old Magic Eye pictures," she told Keller. "At first, there's just a general idea that something's there. Like when you look at the picture you can tell it's there because it's so weird, even if you can't make out what it's supposed to be. Then you get your eyes and your mind just right, and - wham! - it comes into focus. Only I'm bringing lots of different pictures into focus. It's getting easier, though."

What she didn't tell him was that sometimes she could see other things. Glimpses of forest, like she was seeing through their eyes. Glimpses of other places that might have been their memories, and always that deep, almost elemental rage. Their anger was always the first thing she noticed, and the last thing she lost track of when they were moving away.

She didn't want Keller to know that she wasn't just detecting zombies, she was touching their minds, or maybe their souls. Especially given how much harder it was to keep her own temper when they were near. She didn't like the feeling that they were touching her mind back.

Instead, she answered his questions without adding any elaborations, and celebrated the small feeling of control that improving her acuity brought.

Once the wood pile was built and tested, and their travel supplies stashed on the roof, they started exploring further, trusting in her zombie sense to warn them if they were approaching zombies or in danger of getting cut off from the bunker.

A week passed, and they grew more confident, both in Lanie's senses and in their ability to survive. Neither of them had any idea of which plants might be edible, but they tried setting snares according to the directions on the package of wire from the bunker, and made improvised maps of the surrounding area. There was a stream nearby, so they had plenty of water to boil, and the wood stove was equipped with a small cooking surface, so when they finally found a fat squirrel in one of their sprung snares, they happily cooked it up into a stew.

They grew more and more confident, and trekked farther each day, leaving the wood stove burning so that it would keep the bunker warm and be ready for cooking when they returned. They set more snares and spent a good part of each day walking the lines, though for the most part they were re-setting sprung traps.

"Thank God the animals aren't rising as zombies too," Keller said at one point, while making a mess of gutting a rabbit. "Why do you think that is? Is it some sort of disease after all, that just hasn't crossed the species barrier yet?"

"It doesn't seem like a disease to me," Lanie said. She hesitated, wondering whether she should tell him about the rage after all.

Then she felt it. Her head jerked up, her eyes peering intently in the direction of the bunker. Her nostrils flared involuntarily, and she shuddered. "A crowd of them," she said. "Moving... faster than they usually do. We've got to hurry or they'll cut us off."

She took off through the woods at a careful trot, fingering the key in her pocket and hoping she would have time to use it. Sheltering in the bunker seemed a lot safer than sheltering on top of it.

Keller was ahead of her when they reached the clearing, but he stopped dead as he rounded the corner of the bunker. She kept going, making a beeline for the door.

It wasn't there.

The doorway gaped open and unobstructed, until a big man stepped out through it and caught her in his arms. In a single motion, he stepped behind her and twisted her body into some sort of wrestling hold where she couldn't move, let alone reach her gun to shoot him.

Keller dropped the rabbit and ran to help her, but another man, small and wiry, came out swinging and knocked him to the ground with one blow. He kicked him, hard, forestalling his effort to get up again.

"Cooperate," the wiry man said with a big grin, "and nobody gets hurt - too much."

Three more men came out of the bunker and pulled Keller to his feet, zip-tying his hands behind his back before throwing him to the ground again, hard. One of them grabbed his shoulders and sat him up against the woodpile before leaving him there with one more slap, and joining the others who were looking at Lanie.

She hung limply in her captor's grasp, deathly afraid that if he pushed any harder against her neck it would snap.

"Ease up a little there, Dent," the wiry man said. "Our hostess is looking mighty uncomfortable."

"Whatever you say, Jay." The man holding her let go for an instant, but before she could resist, he had her again, holding her upper arms tightly against her body, and holding her up so that she had to stand on her toes. One of the others pulled her gun out of its holster and tucked it into his own waistband.

Jay stepped closer, tugging her shirt straight, his manic grin making her skin crawl. "So kind of you to get the place ready for us," he said. "Warm house, hot food, soft bed. Oh, we are going to have all sorts of fun tonight!"

He grabbed her breasts and pushed his mouth against hers, swiping his tongue between her lips before she could think to grit her teeth. She bit down instead, and rocked back against her captor with the force of Jay's punch to her gut.

He backed off while she gagged, wiping his mouth. "Oh yes, all sorts of fun." He slapped her face, hard enough to knock her head back and set her eyes watering. "Now listen up, because here's the rules."

The feel of the approaching zombies and her own fury at being attacked by humans - living humans! - fed into each other, echoing and amplifying until she couldn't hear a word the stranger was saying over the roaring in her ears. If only the zombies would be smart this time, surround them so that these fools couldn't flee. It didn't even occur to her that she would be trapped too. All she wanted was to destroy them utterly.

Then the mass of zombies split, moving into exactly the maneuver she had imagined.

***

Keller wanted to stand, wanted to get his hands free, wanted to grab the hatchet leaning against the woodpile and lay into the men before they could do anything more to Lanie.

He made it as far as his knees, but a heavy boot attached to an even heavier leg hit his chest and propelled him back into the stacked wood, knocking his head hard enough to make him dizzy and driving splinters into his bound arms. He felt sick with anger and helplessness as the leader started listing off his vile "rules."

Then a low, angry laugh rolled across the clearing and sent a chill running down his spine. He looked up to see Lanie, still captive, baring her teeth in a wide grin and laughing in the man's face.

Jay stepped back a pace, and hit her again. Then again, but still she kept laughing.

The man with Lanie's gun swore, and shouted "Zombies!" He fumbled out the gun and pointed it at the woods, where five or six figures were shambling through the trees. Nothing happened when he pulled the trigger, though, and he threw the gun aside without bothering to check the safety.

"Only six of them," Jay sneered. "Don't go anywhere, sweetheart - this is going to be quick."

Keller shook his head, trying to get his bearings. Lanie had sensed a horde of zombies approaching, not a handful, and from the south, not the west. But if he could get his hands free, get Lanie free, and then get up on the roof... He rolled over and pushed himself toward the hatchet, praying he would have enough time.

The big guy dropped Lanie, who collapsed onto the ground, still laughing while the strangers grabbed golf clubs and tire irons and ran to attack the zombies. As soon as they were past her, she leapt to her feet and ran to Keller.

"Thank God," he said, "We've got to get to the roof."

She didn't even pause, though, just grabbed the hatchet and spun away, running for the men.

"Lanie!" He pushed himself to his feet, wavering between running after her and trying to get to the roof with his hands still bound. Lanie hadn't been wrong once, which meant there was still a horde on the way.

She didn't react to his shout. Instead, she gave a yell of her own and brought the hatchet down on Jay's neck, striking from behind. He screamed, staggering around to face her just in time to catch another blow.

More screams filled the air as the others turned to see what had happened, and then looked beyond.

"There's too many of them," one of the men shouted. "Back to the house!"

Keller didn't wait for the horde to come into view, he just ran up the woodpile, throwing himself into a jump that got enough of his body onto the roof that he could roll and pull his legs up too. He laid down, scraping his wrists and the ziptie against the rough concrete edge of the roof and straining until it finally broke. Then he grabbed the shovel and stood to look out over the clearing.

Three of the men were still fighting, but they were overwhelmed even as he watched. The zombies in front of them caught hold of their weapons, holding them still while others moved in for the kill.

A few feet away, a smaller figure was hacking at something on the ground.

"Lanie," he breathed, horrified by the sea of zombies surrounding her.

The last screams rang out and were silenced, and the three men fell to the ground. After a moment, their bodies stood up again.

Lanie let out a guttural yell, and swung her hatchet at the nearest, pushing past two other zombies to chop at his neck.

Moans rose from dozens of dead throats in an insane chorus, and they fell on the men's reanimated bodies, tearing them to pieces.

The sound faded when the bodies fell, but Keller was too preoccupied to notice. The nearest zombies had turned their attention to him, and were fumbling at the wood pile. He swung the shovel like a bat, knocking the highest zombie off the pile entirely, and then he wedged the shovel blade between the bunker and the plank the wood was piled against and levered it out, pushing in short, sharp thrusts when it didn't fall right away.

They hadn't planned on the zombies being close enough to push back when they dropped the pile. Or on only one person being up top to do the pushing. After a few frantic moments, though, the shaking worked, knocking enough of the small logs free that the rest cascaded down under the climbing zombies. He backed away from the edge and turned in a quick circle to make sure they hadn't found some other way up, then waited.

The zombies went back to their usual slow, unsteady shamble, milling around the clearing.

The sky above was still blue, but it was late, and the setting sun left the clearing and the woods beyond in ever-deepening shadows. Keller looked for Lanie, but it was too dark to make out one face in the crowd of zombies. There was no sign of living movement, though. He was alone.

When full dark fell, Keller cracked a light stick so that he could see if the zombies tried climbing up again. It was warm enough that he didn't really need a blanket, but he pulled one out anyway, trying to take comfort in it. He longed for some sort of distraction, something to stop the endless mental replay of the day's events. Could they have gotten away, if they'd been more careful coming back to the bunker? If he had been quicker to warn Lanie away from the door?

He'd gotten so used to Lanie being able to sense zombies, that he hadn't even thought about what other dangers they might face. And now...

He tried to comfort himself by thinking of the men's terrified screams before they died, and the knowledge that at least they had suffered for what they had done, but it didn't help. Lanie was still dead.

Eventually, sleep claimed him.

He opened his eyes to the dappled light of dawn.

There was no sign of zombies below, and nothing moved when he dropped the shovel and packs to the ground. He took a deep breath to steady his nerves, and lowered himself down to hang from the roof by his fingertips, before he dropped the remaining foot. Picking up the shovel, he walked around the bunker, pausing to check inside for lingering zombies before he steeled himself to approach the small body he had seen lying amidst the blood and bits of the dead men. The least he could do was bury her.

She lay curled on the ground, body intact, and he couldn't see what had killed her or why she hadn't risen again. Cautiously, he nudged her side with the shovel, and jumped back when she moaned.

"Oh no." He didn't want to deal with this. Didn't think he could face dismembering her after all they had been through.

She groaned again and rolled to her knees, holding her head. Then she sat up and hugged herself, quivering.

No, not quivering, shivering!

"Lanie?" Keller dropped the shovel and felt at her neck for a pulse. It was faint, but it was there. "Ok, Lanie. I don't know how you're still alive, but I'm not going to waste it. Come on, let's get you warmed up."

She didn't respond, but she didn't resist either when he picked her up and brought her inside.

***

Lanie awoke to a delicious feeling of warmth and safety. Keller was spooned up against her back, and the air in the bunker was warm from the wood stove. She had some inkling of bad dreams, but it faded along with her awareness as she let herself relax back into sleep.

The next time she woke, it was because she was too hot, and thirsty, and hungry, and sore all over. Memories surfaced as her mind woke more fully, and she sat up as quietly as possible, turning to look at her bedmate. It was Keller after all, and she found herself smiling with a sense of fondness as well as relief. The sight of her gun on the table next to his head brought back more memories, though, and she looked to the door for confirmation.

It was there, the deformed metal wedged into its former opening and held in place with two of their food bins. She rose and padded over to peer out through the gap where the intruders had pried it open.

Keller came up behind her, draping a blanket over her shoulders and wrapping his arms around her. "You were hypothermic just a few hours ago," he said. "It's important to stay warm."

Her spine stiffened for a moment, then she held the blanket close and leaned back into him. "What happened?" she asked, staring out at the body parts strewn across the clearing. Two crows fought over some choice piece and then took flight, squabbling in the air.

"You don't remember?"

"I remember... being angry," she said. The words didn't even start to touch on the intensity of what she remembered, but it was better that way. She wanted that distance.

"It's not important," Keller said, giving her a squeeze. "What matters is that they're dead, the zombies are gone, and you're ok."

_Am I?_ a little voice inside asked. _What am I? What did I do?_

"Of course I am," she said out loud, pushing the voice away. She turned to Keller and opened the blanket to put her arms around him. "And you're ok too."

They would need to rework their plans, now that the bunker was broken and they had been reminded of the threat a simple human could pose. All that could wait, though. For now, she just wanted to feel alive.

Keller's lips parted under hers, and he held her steady for the few steps back to the bed.

##

##

## ~~*~~

##

##

## Dreamtime

##

Cara walked down the street as quickly as she could manage, wishing it was easier to breathe. She thought she was safe. She had waited a week in the old apartment over the hardware store, carefully rationing her food and water until a full day had gone by without any zombies walking through the streets below.

She couldn't believe how patient she had been. If you had told her, before, that she would watch out a window for days on end with nothing else to do, she would have said that you didn't know teenage girls very well. But her phone's charge had died some time while she was still delirious, and she didn't have her ereader or laptop, or TV, or a radio, or even a landline that worked. There were a couple of battered old paperbacks in the apartment, but nothing she was interested in reading.

The apartment was a puzzle.

Cara had woken up there, alone, sweating profusely and clawing her way up out of fever dreams that blended with her memories and made everything suspect. She had never been there before, had no idea who it belonged to or how she had gotten there, or why she had been left alone.

Someone had left her an assortment of canned food, and a bathtub filled to the brim with water. So she had eaten, and drunk her fill, and improvised a chamber pot out of a big stock pot with a lid.

And then she had looked out the window.

The street below was filled with zombies the first time she looked out. She had frozen, sure she was hallucinating, but unable to make herself call out and question what she was seeing.

Instead, she watched.

Now, she walked, wondering if she'd even be able to run if she needed to. But she was out of food, and running low on water, and sometime during the last day, as she watched the street and saw nothing moving, the idea of walking to the pharmacy for some cough medicine had coalesced into a plan.

Not much of a plan, she thought, pausing to try and catch her breath. She swayed where she stood, and took the moment to look around. A plastic grocery bag scuttled along the sidewalk in the wind, but nothing else moved. She stood in the middle of the street, looking back at the hardware store. It felt like she'd been walking for half an hour at least, but there it was, maybe ten yards away. The pharmacy was another two blocks.

_Maybe I'm dreaming,_ she thought. _One of those frustration dreams where everything takes forever, there's always something in the way, and you can never really get anywhere._ She rather hoped that she was still dreaming. It would explain the zombies, and why she was so completely alone.

But not the tightness in her lungs. That physical sensation was too real to ascribe to a dream, though she couldn't hear herself wheezing the way she usually could with a chest cold. _Maybe I'm just still sick,_ she thought. _If my chest is really this congested, it could make it into my dreams. Like when I really need to pee..._

She started walking again, trying to remember the sensation of waking up, of switching over from dream perception to real body perception. She felt dizzy, but the world stayed solid around her.

_Stuck_ , she observed, _if I'm dreaming rather than awake._

Neither option seemed truly reassuring. Even in dreams where she was drowning, she could still breathe, still feel the air passing through her nose and throat. That contrast was usually what woke her, in fact. So if she was dreaming that she was having trouble breathing, then her real body was having trouble breathing, and she needed to wake up and do something about it.

On the other hand, if she wasn't dreaming, there was something seriously wrong with the whole world, and she was still having trouble breathing.

_In and out,_ she thought, trying to calm herself. _Just keep breathing. Whether I'm dreaming or awake, the first thing to do is to keep breathing. Just keep breathing._

That mantra got her the rest of the way to the pharmacy, where she stared in the window for several minutes before trying the door. It was open, but the pharmacy was empty, of both zombies and medicine. It looked like someone had systematically cleared all the shelves, not just in the public area, but behind the counter as well.

_Just like a frustration dream_ , she thought, swaying a little. _Nothing to do but play it out, though, either way. All right, grocery store next._

She went out the back door, since the nearest grocery store was along the street behind the pharmacy. After that, she could try the nearest gas station, and after that... well, if she was dreaming, then hopefully by then she would wake up, and her Mom would give her some cough medicine. If she wasn't... _Deal with it then,_ she thought. _Right now, just keep going._

Stumbling down the street to the grocery store, she felt a bit like a zombie herself. The longer she stayed up, the more tired and clumsy she felt, and the lightheadedness didn't help at all. A bench she had never noticed before loomed up in front of her, and she gratefully staggered over to it and sat down.

Cara closed her eyes, and slouched down until her head could rest against the back of the bench. Her back and ribs hurt, and each breath felt like a triumph. _Breathe in, breathe out. Breathe in, breathe out._

"Hey!"

She startled up from her slouch, gasping for breath as her heart started going double-time. Her wild eyes focused on two men standing a couple of yards away, looking at her warily and holding shovels as if they were weapons.

She tried to catch her breath, to ask who they were, but instead she doubled over in a coughing fit as her lungs reacted to the adrenaline by trying to turn themselves inside out. When she was done, she lay on her side on the bench, eyes closed, holding herself tight against the pain.

"You're the Winters girl, aren't you? Thought you were dead."

Cara opened her eyes and looked up at the men, who were still holding their shovels defensively. "Not yet," she croaked. "But I think I might be dreaming."

The older one barked out a laugh. "I wish. And where exactly did you come from?"

"Um..." She looked past them, gathering her thoughts. "I was in an apartment, over the hardware store. I don't know how I got there."

The younger man lowered his shovel. "Ed..."

The older man held up a hand, but lowered his own shovel. "I guess you were sick with the flu, then, when the rising started. Is that right?"

Cara shrugged. "It felt like the flu, I guess. I was pretty feverish. I'm not sure what memories are real, and what are nightmares." She eyed the younger man. "You're Joey Blake, aren't you? Didn't you go away to college?"

He nodded. "I came back when my parents got sick. Then pretty much everyone got sick. And then..."

Cara looked around. "If I'm not dreaming, why is the town empty? Why was I all alone? Mom wouldn't have left me alone."

Ed scowled at her. "I'm not proud of it, but it was necessary."

She cocked her head to the side. "What was necessary?"

He sighed. "Stranding you like that. Flu was killing too many people, and as soon as they died they got up and started killing more, y'know? So the sick had to be isolated. Couldn't leave you all together, or one dead one would kill the rest, couldn't nurse you, or a death would kill the nurse. So we left you all alone, and hoped for the best."

Cara stared at him. He was talking about the dead rising as matter-of-factly as if they were bread. "I did... see the zombies. But my mom..."

Joey shook his head. "I haven't seen her at the shelter."

"Died three weeks ago," Ed said.

Cara gasped and screwed her eyes shut against the sudden, overwhelming sorrow. It hit like a physical blow, making her whole body shake. She had dismissed the memories as a fever dream because they were too horrible to be real, but now they came flooding back. Mom getting sick, but insisting on taking care of everyone else. Then the morning when Cara went to see why she wasn't awake yet. She remembered people holding her back while they took the body away, because she didn't want to let her go...

_No, no, no,_ she thought desperately. _Just a dream, it's really just a dream, and Mom's going to be there waiting for me when I wake up. I can deal... with all of this as long as it's just a dream._

She repeated it until she started to believe it. She built up the conviction that her mom was fine, and the world was fine, and that she was only sleeping, and the sorrow receded a bit. _No more questioning,_ she told herself, feeling a little calmer again. _It's all just a dream. Everything is fine, and in the morning I'll wake up and tell Mom all about it._

"What do we do?" she heard Joey asking. "We can't just leave her alone again."

Cara sighed, wiping at her face with a sleeve. _In the meantime,_ she thought, _I'll play it through._ She pushed herself to her feet, though she swayed a little. Tears were still streaming down her face, and her nose was running, but she tried to ignore it.

"What you do is you tell me where to get some cough medicine," she said firmly. "The pharmacy was out."

##

##

## ~~*~~

##

##

## Thou Shalt Not Kill

##

Caleb leaned against his patch of wall and shifted his weight, trying to get comfortable enough to doze off. _How useless am I_ , he thought. _After everything that's happened, I sit here missing my bed_.

He could imagine the feel of it now, the way the memory foam warmed and conformed to his body. On a Saturday morning like this, he would snuggle into his pillow, cocooned in his comforter, and pretend the rest of the world didn't exist. Or that he didn't exist, depending on how bad his depression was that week.

Now he made do with a thin sheet, and a spot of hard floor against the wall. He had given the comforter away to one of the few families who still had surviving children. They needed it more than him. Deserved it more than him. A sharp wave of shame flooded him at the thought, and he pulled up his knees, trying to take up less space.

_Stupid lump_ , he thought. _Sitting here in the emergency shelter, taking up space that someone else could use._ As usual, he wished he was dead. It would be easy enough; just walk outside and wander around until he found a zombie. Except that would be suicide.

_Thou shalt not kill_ , he reminded himself, as he did every time. He wasn't much for church, but it didn't get any simpler than that. You didn't take a life, not even your own.

Of course, these days he had a more immediate reason not to kill himself. If he died, he'd become one of them, killing the living with no concern for sin or God's will. If that happened, would he still be him? Would he know the evil he did?

He wished that he could talk to the zombies. Find out why they felt such a need to kill. They never ate the bodies of their victims, so it wasn't hunger. Were they doing God's will, punishing the world collectively? If so, which sin had been so great that it merited such a punishment? Or were they puppets of Satan, victims just like the people they killed?

Not that it mattered. He couldn't inflict a zombie as big and strong as himself on the other survivors, not even to free up resources. Better just to be a lump...

"Just launch it from the roof, and BOOM! We can kill a ton of them, all at once!"

The excited discussion across the room had already drawn a crowd of spectators over to examine whatever it was that the tech school students had come up with. Now their raised voices made even Caleb muster enough curiosity to raise his head and look over.

Georgie, the most prolific of the weapon-makers, was holding what looked like a stock pot, with the edges crimped over and some sort of complicated lid. "The test blast destroyed an entire house," he said. "Nothing left but splinters. Drop one of these babies in the middle of a horde, and all that's left is the clean-up."

Caleb rested his head back in his hands. Just another bomb design.

"Yo, Caleb!"

He looked up again to see Bill, their self-appointed operations manager, standing in front of him with a massive sledge hammer.

"The streets look pretty clear, so we're sending out foraging parties again. You're going to guard Jamie's team, ok?"

He wanted to say no. He wanted to explain that he was useless and he'd just let him down, but he knew it wouldn't do any good. He was a big guy, even though he'd dropped at least twenty pounds since the beginning of the disaster. And because he was big, big enough to easily swing the sledgehammer that made Bill look like a child, he had a job to do, no matter how small and useless he felt inside.

He levered himself up and took the sledgehammer listlessly before wandering out to the vestibule where the foragers were loading up with bags to fill.

"All right," Jamie said when she saw him. "Let's go!"

The grocery stores were already picked clean, so they headed to the northern suburbs, to break into houses in search of canned goods and medicines.

Caleb kept watch outside when they reached their target neighborhood. Zombies never stayed, if they rose inside a house. They always went looking for the living, so the foragers, breaking into long-vacant houses, weren't taking much of a risk.

Besides, each of them carried a crowbar or something similar - useful for breaking into houses and locked cabinets, but also enough of a weapon to fend off a zombie long enough to run for help. Crowbars didn't do damage fast enough to take a zombie down cleanly, though. That's what Caleb was there for.

In theory, anyway.

He knew what was expected of him, though he hadn't had to put it into practice yet. The tech school kids loved to go on and on about the best ways to kill zombies, as well as arguing about what caused the zombies to rise in the first place. They never really agreed on much except for the fact that you had to destroy the head, spine, and all four limbs before you could confidently call a zombie dead.

So far, he had played guard for three foraging trips, and the only time they'd seen a zombie had been in the distance, when they were already heading back to the shelter. He didn't know what he would do if they ran into something he had to fight. Just the idea of laying into a human body with the sledgehammer made him feel sick.

Thou shalt not kill, right? But what about zombies? They had died once already – did that make killing them a second time better or worse? Did people stop being people after they died the first time? Besides, God allowed them to exist, so who was Caleb to say that they couldn't?

A scream cut through his reverie, and he took off at a run. The shrill noise of an emergency whistle sounded out, followed shortly by a slim woman running out of the house he had been running to. She dodged him, narrowly avoiding a collision, and then stood in the middle of the street, blasting out the emergency retreat signal until the rest of the team appeared from their houses.

"Zombies, coming out of the forest all along the road from the west," she said as they gathered in the street. "We've got to run, or we're going to be cut off."

They ran.

Caleb kept to the west side of the street, hoping with every step that they would make it back without having to fight. Without having to see if he could kill.

Back to what, though? A life of being a fraud, depended on to protect people who he was just going to let down? And no matter how much he cut down what he ate, he was still using up food that other people could have used. Like those kids he had given his comforter to. He slowed a little, letting the others edge out ahead of him.

Then he sped up again, remembering that he couldn't let himself become a zombie. He caught up to the slowest of the foragers and paced her, determined to at least make sure that no one fell behind.

Zombies never seemed to move at anything faster than a walk, but for the entire run back they saw knots of the shambling bodies breaking out of the trees to their right. Caleb knew that more zombies had disappeared than the survivors had destroyed, but he didn't think anyone had expected zombies from other cities to show up here, flooding into town like a tidal wave.

The foragers stayed ahead of the flood of undead all the way into town, but then Jamie slid to a halt, bringing them all up short at the sight of zombies straight ahead. There were only ten in view, but that was enough to cut them off from the safety and supplies of the shelter. "We can hole up in one of the apartments," she said, looking around wildly for a good prospect. "Hope they go away before we starve, maybe signal the others for help?"

"Keep running," Caleb shouted, pushing past.

He raised the sledgehammer, running straight at the knot of zombies. He swung it, not to kill, but to move. Its massive momentum made it easy to sweep the nearest zombies off their feet, knocking them out of the foragers' way long enough to run past safely.

"Caleb!" Jamie shouted, slowing as another group came into view. Caleb barreled ahead again to sweep them away.

It was a clear shot the rest of the way to the shelter door, no more than fifty yards, and he grinned as Jamie and the others sprinted past him. They were going to make it!

Then a scream rang out from behind.

He turned so fast that he skidded, catching himself with one hand against the ground before he could fall. Three yards back, the slender woman who had blown the whistle sprawled on the ground, struggling to get her leg free from the zombie that had tripped her.

Caleb was there in seconds, swinging the sledge hammer to shatter the bones of the zombie's arm. Then he grabbed the girl's arm and pulled her to her feet, shielding her with his body while she tested her balance and broke into a limping run.

"Go!" he shouted when she looked back at him and hesitated. He faced the zombies, backing away slowly while he listened to her uneven footfalls growing further away.

The zombie that had attacked her rose and took a shambling step towards him, holding out its ruined arm and moaning.

"I'm sorry," Caleb said, a sudden wave of shame catching him by surprise. It had felt so good to swing that sledgehammer and shatter its bones. He had freed the woman, but he had also done violence to another human being, undead or not.

"I had to," he whispered, but it felt like an excuse. "I had to!" he insisted, more to himself than to the zombie.

Behind him, he heard the sound of the woman reaching the shelter and being welcomed in. "Caleb, come on!" someone shouted, before the door slammed shut again.

"You were going to kill her," he said, gaining a little confidence from the knowledge that she was safe. "God says 'Thou shalt not kill,' so I'm not going to kill you," he said, walking slowly backward as he spoke. "But I'm not going to just stand here and let you kill either. Understand?"

The man's partially decayed face twisted into a grimace, and he waved his ruined arm angrily.

A chill settled into the pit of Caleb's gut.

"Do you understand? Are you still in there?" He looked around to the others, who had stopped advancing and were now just standing and staring at him. Some looked away as soon as he met their eyes, while others stared back, almost defiantly.

"You are," he whispered. "You're not just mindless monsters, you're still in there."

He hugged the sledgehammer close, frozen in place by the horror of that realization.

"Why?" he asked, staring at one of the women who dared to meet his eyes. "Why do you kill us? Why are you here?"

She let out a slow, clumsy chuckle and looked past his shoulder just as a cold arm wrapped around his neck and clamped down on his throat.

For a moment, he felt a sense of relief. He had longed for death for so long that he almost forgot what death meant now. But then he remembered. _If I die, I'm one of them. I'll kill like them. I can't let that happen!_

The sledgehammer fell to the ground while he struggled to loosen the arm holding him enough for him to get a breath. He jabbed his elbows back and felt something give, but the grip on his neck stayed strong, even as more hands took hold of him, dragging him down.

He spun as he fell, and found himself looking up at the shelter. He fought, drawing in another breath and trying to feel around for the sledgehammer. The whole time, he kept his eyes locked on the shelter, on the reminder of why he couldn't let himself become a zombie.

Lack of air made him lightheaded, though, and his gaze wandered up. Motion dragged his eyes back to the roof, where the tech school kids had set up their trebuchet. Figures moved around, though he couldn't tell what they were doing.

_I'm sorry_ , he thought at them, feeling his body go weak from lack of air. _I didn't mean to..._

The trebuchet arm snapped up, launching an object into the air that arced up and then down, straight at Caleb and the horde of zombies that now surrounded him. Recognition struck, and he had just enough time before the bomb landed for a smile, and one last thought.

Thank God.

##

##

## ~~*~~

##

##

## Corpse Pose

##

Jill walked as silently as she could through the wasteland of abandoned suburbia, keeping her eyes moving in a constant scan of her surroundings. There was at least one zombie following her, its aura an angry red flare that stood out even with houses between them. She needed more, though, many more if she was going to fulfill her "running duty."

When she had finally made it to Refuge, she thought she was done with zombies. She wasn't a fighter. All she had ever been able to do was run, run and run some more. The zombie-sight had kept her alive, since with it she didn't have to worry about stumbling on zombies unaware, but the constant flight, not to mention the loss of everyone she had ever known, left her soul-tired and nervous.

Even after the first rising, when everyone knew the zombies were real, nobody she joined up with would believe that she could see them through buildings, or in the dark. Five groups she had joined, and then left when they wouldn't believe a horde was close and coming towards them.

But she couldn't see when she was sleeping, and she had to sleep in order to have the strength to run, so she kept joining up with other survivors. The sixth group, finally, had brought her to Refuge, an actual fortified human settlement.

She saw a glint of red out of the corner of her eye and spun in a circle, taking a full gestalt impression of her surroundings before peering intently in the direction of the new aura. She now had two zombies approaching from tangent angles, but this other aura was further away, and more spread out – a horde.

She picked her direction and set off at a jog, fighting down panic. She couldn't believe she was running towards a horde instead of putting as much distance between her and them as humanly possible.

Worse, she was running towards them in order to get their attention. She pulled the noisemaker off her belt and held it tight, panting more with fear than with exertion. How did she let them talk her into this?

***

Yesterday, when she walked into Refuge for the first time, she was impressed by the gate, the walls, and the guards. The sheer number of people was almost overwhelming, even though there were no more than she might have seen in the street on a normal day, before the rising.

Now, after months in which she had seen less than a hundred living humans, total, even twenty together at one time seemed like a huge crowd. And the guards at the entrance claimed that there were hundreds living in Refuge.

There was a problem, though. A single blood-red aura within Refuge. She paused at the gate, looking at that aura and debating what to do.

"Something wrong?" The man who spoke to her sported the stereotypical white coat of a scientist or doctor, and he looked incongruously cheerful.

She looked at him, then at the aura, then back at him. She knew she had to try at least. "You have a zombie in the compound," she said bluntly.

"Really?" If anything, he looked more cheerful. "And how can you detect it?"

She scowled at him, wondering why he was reacting so strangely, and whether she would be able to get away if it turned out that Refuge was a trap instead.

"Do you smell it? Hear its thoughts? Feel a grating on your nerves?" He paused, looking excited. "See it? Can you see it?" He stared at her, as if willing her to say yes.

She complied, still feeling very puzzled. "Yes."

"Yes!" He shouted and pumped his fist in the air, drawing annoyed looks from the guards, and puzzled looks from everyone else. "Excellent," he continued, tugging at her arm and moving away. "Come along, you're exactly who we've been waiting for."

"But the zombie!" She resisted, pulling her arm out of his grasp.

He raised his eyebrows, then smiled and shook his head. "Not to worry, my dear. It's immobilized, guarded and imprisoned outside the main wall. We keep it there, as a quick way of finding useful people like yourself. Perfectly safe. Unless you see more than one?"

She shook her head, baffled, and let him pull her deeper into the complex.

The strange man introduced himself as Dr. Harding, head of the Institute for Zombie Studies. He babbled on about their work as he dragged her through a dizzying maze of streets, then inside through equally extensive corridors, but she felt like she only understood one word in five. Finally, though, he led her into a large lounge and stopped, clapping his hands for attention.

He introduced her to the staff of the Institute then, a dizzying parade of people whose names she forgot almost as soon as he said them, including almost a dozen people like her, people who had survived because they had more than the normal five senses to warn them of zombies.

One of them was Ananda. The first thing Jill noticed was that she was tall, with a thin but muscular build. She moved with the sort of smooth confidence that Jill associated with dancers or gymnasts, and her smile was so warm and sincere that Jill felt an answering smile spread across her face, for the first time in months.

"Ananda is like you, my dear; she actually sees the auras of the undead. And the living, but of course that's neither here nor there. Sight seems to be both the most precise and the most rare of zombie senses. Until you, Ananda was the only seer we had, which limited our more ambitious efforts quite a bit, I'm afraid. Tell me, Jill, do you know yoga?"

She stared at him, wondering if the question was a non-sequitur or actually relevant. He was obviously waiting for an answer, though. "Um. My mom had a couple of yoga videos... before... but I've never taken a class or anything."

He frowned, then shrugged. "You were going to be on running duty to start with anyway. This just means it'll take you a little longer to get up to speed on the rest of it. Now, you should eat and rest, and tomorrow we'll send you out on your first assignment."

Ananda smiled and waved, while Dr. Harding led Jill away to first the kitchen and then a tiny, dorm-style room. He babbled the whole time, but not about anything she actually wanted to know, like what running duty involved or why he thought he had the right to give her any sort of assignment.

Before she could interrupt him long enough to ask, he was gone, leaving her alone with food and bed. She ate, washed up in the bathroom next door, then locked and barricaded her door before falling into a deep, dreamless sleep.

***

Now, she knew what he meant by assignments and running duty, but she still didn't know why.

She didn't wonder why the actual Institute was located outside Refuge – that was an obvious safety precaution. But why did they need to bring zombies into the Institute? Why did they need a full horde, and why did they want it brought in all at once, at a run?

Dr. Harding had said, "You'll see."

Ananda had smiled and said, "It'll make sense once you see it."

The others just shook their heads and said they couldn't explain.

Jill slowed, looking around in all directions and positioning herself carefully between the horde and the most direct path to the Institute. "I'd better see," she muttered under her breath. "Because if I don't, there's no way they're ever getting me to do this again."

She edged into normal, physical view of the horde and whirled the noisemaker, making a show of looking at it while she watched the horde out of the corner of her eye. Their aura turned a darker, angrier red and a chorus of moans rose up as they started towards her at a slow shamble. She looked up, let out a scream that was only partly faked, and took off down the road.

Zombies were slow but implacable. She probably could have just sprinted the whole way back to the Institute and still brought them in, but Dr. Harding had warned her not to risk losing them. Every few minutes, she paused, looked around to gauge their progress and make sure no strays were flanking her, then made a show of "hiding" and catching her breath. As soon as they got close again, she would break away, running down the middle of the street in plain view.

Necessary or not, it worked, and before sunset she ran into the open warehouse bay, and back to the double-walled cage in the back. A teenage boy swung open the gate on the first layer of bars as she approached, looking anxiously past her at the approaching horde. He closed and locked it swiftly, while another guard opened the inner gate, locking it behind them before disappearing through another door, this one solid steel in a concrete block wall.

Dr. Harding stopped her, letting the other door close in front of them and nodding towards the open room. "You'll want to see this."

Jill turned, setting her back against the wall and trying not to doubt the strength of their cage. It had to be strong enough, if Dr. Harding was exposing himself as well as her. She looked around the enclosure to distract herself from the horde of zombies shambling rapidly closer.

"What..." Seeing Ananda in the enclosure with them wasn't entirely a surprise, but to see her serenely balancing on her head while the zombies approached was a bit of a shock.

She cut off her own question, but Dr. Harding still responded. "You'll see."

The horde, over fifty zombies in various stages of decay, had reached the outer layer of the enclosure. The front-most clawed and pulled at the bars, sticking their hands through the gaps and trying to reach the living humans beyond. The last two stragglers passed from the outer yard into the warehouse, and the rolling door crashed down.

Jill jumped, looking anxiously at the other door, the one that lead to safety behind a concrete wall, and wondered when they were going to stop fooling around and destroy the horde.

Instead, Dr. Harding pushed a button on the wall, and soothing bell tones rolled out across the room.

Ananda swung her feet to the floor and stood up, stretching her arms out and then bringing her palms together in front of her chest. "Welcome!" Ananda said, her voice carrying to the far corners of the warehouse.

The zombies paused, shifting their focus from Jill to her, then redoubling their efforts to get through the bars.

"I'm so glad all of you could make it. Today we're doing something special. Now, I know you think you want to get through this cage and get your hands on me, but first we're going to have a little class I like to call 'Yoga for Zombies.' At the end of class, if all of you participate, I promise to open the door and come out."

A few of the zombies slowed in their clawing and quieted their moaning.

"That's right," Ananda said, slowly, clearly, loudly. "I will come to you."

Jill was astonished to see the horde still and back away, watching Ananda intently. "They can understand her?" she hissed to Dr. Harding.

He nodded, but put a finger to his lips, hushing her.

"But first," Ananda said, holding up a finger. "You have to join my yoga class. I come to you, after you do yoga with me. Now! Arms up, reach for the sky, now bring your hands to heart center. That's right! Spread out a little, give each other some room."

She launched into a series of flowing movements, calling out directions as she went. "Mountain pose, now forward bend, now rise up to a flat back – no, keep your hands on the floor, that's right. Forward fold, now legs back into high plank. Low pushup, then up into cobra. Keep your pelvis down, pull your chest forward, good! Now back, into down dog. Keep your heels pushing towards the floor."

At first, the zombies just stared at her. Then, as she kept moving, kept shouting out directions in that calm, friendly voice, first one, then another joined in. By her second time through the cycle of poses, half of the zombies were following along, and by the third cycle, every last one of them was at least moving their arms in imitation of the poses.

Jill was stunned to see zombies, clumsy shambling zombies, moving through a yoga routine with something approaching grace.

Dr. Harding leaned over and whispered in her ear. "What do you see?"

She shot him an incredulous glance. What did he think she saw? "Zombies doing yoga," she answered as quietly as she could.

"Yes, but what do you _see_?"

She looked back at the zombies, wondering what he was getting at, and gasped. "Their auras," she whispered back to him. "Their auras are changing!"

She couldn't usually see the auras of living things, though she knew in principle that they could vary in color. She had never seen a zombie, however, with an aura that was not red, usually the dark red of clotted blood.

The color of the horde had been just that hideous shade, but now the zombies' auras had lightened, brightened. Some were even orange, and as she watched, all of them lightened further.

"What's happening?" This was too strange, far too strange for her taste. Everyone knew that zombies were mindless horrors, that the only way to stop them was to destroy their bodies. But here they were doing yoga, of all things, obviously understanding Ananda's words, and changing the color of their auras.

Dr. Harding caught her eye and put a finger to his lips. She let it go, not wanting to disrupt Ananda's unbelievable rapport with the undead. She would wait and see, but when it was all over, someone had better tell her what was going on.

The class went on, and on, and on. Jill watched intently while the zombies' auras shifted in color, first to orange, then yellow, then green and blue. Only when the whole room was glowing purple in her zombie-sight did Ananda change the cycle.

"Well done, all of you," Ananda said, "Now it's time for savasana, our final pose. Lie down on your backs. Let your arms and legs hang loose on the ground, palms up, muscles relaxed. Let your mind be still, let the world fall away. Let all your cares and concerns go. Just relax, and let yourself be."

The room was silent except for the sound of meditation bells ringing softly from the speakers.

Before Jill's eyes, one of the purple auras flashed to white and disappeared. A few minutes passed, and then another did the same, followed by several more in quick succession. A pause of several minutes, and then dozens more flared out, until there were none left.

Ananda unlocked both gates and walked out. "Namaste," she said to the air, looking up. "Thank you." Then she returned, locking the gates securely behind her, leaving the corpses where they were.

"Are they... dead?" Jill asked. "I mean dead-dead?"

"The spirits that animated them are at peace," Ananda replied.

"I don't..." Jill wasn't sure she wanted to know, but she thought she might need to, if she wanted to keep surviving. "What do you mean?"

Dr. Harding answered with a question. "What do you think zombies are?"

She glanced back and forth between him and Ananda. "Is this a trick question? They're undead. The risen dead. The walking dead. Zombies."

"All right. So where do you think they came from? Why do the dead rise and walk and kill?"

She tried never to ask herself that question. She didn't like any of the answers that she had heard. "I don't know," she said quietly. Then she squared her shoulders and glared at him defiantly. "Some people say it's because we were sinful, and God wanted to punish us. Some people say the government was experimenting and lost control of some bio-weapon. But nobody actually knows. Not me, and not you."

Dr. Harding raised his eyebrows at her last comment, but was still smiling. "True enough. I don't know for sure. But I do have a good idea." He waved a hand at the corpses on the floor. "These are now just corpses, not zombies. Do you agree?"

She glanced around, and nodded. There were no auras, and no movement.

"And yet," he continued, "within a day they will all be zombies again. They will continue to reanimate, no matter how many times we lay them to rest, until the bodies degrade to the point of disintegrity. But why? Is it the same spirits, over and over again? Were the spirits Ananda just released, in fact, the same spirits that animated these bodies when they were alive? I think not."

Jill shifted uneasily and looked at Ananda, trying to see what she thought of this idea. The other woman looked her in the eye and nodded earnestly.

Dr. Harding watched the exchange and nodded himself. "Exactly. The first rising was a massive event. Dead bodies everywhere rose up in anger and started adding to their numbers by killing the living. Why?"

Jill just glared at him, wishing he would get to the point.

"Well," he continued, "not many people are aware of this, but just before the first rising - within minutes of it, in fact - we lost contact with China. One of my colleagues in the CDC was on the phone when the person on the other end simply... stopped. The line wasn't dead, but his contact was. It wasn't an isolated incident, either. After that, we couldn't raise a single soul, from Hong Kong to Beijing, which are well over a thousand miles apart. Just think of it - a singular event, affecting an area that large. We're talking about millions, maybe billions of people, all dead in an instant with no warning, no time to prepare their souls. Can it really be a coincidence that the first rising started right after?"

"That doesn't make sense," Jill snapped. "Lots of people have died in the past without warning. Our own people were dying of the flu for weeks before the rising. So why get zombies now, from this one 'event' of yours, but never before?"

Dr. Harding shrugged.

Ananda wrapped her arms around herself as if she was cold. "It's like you said," she said, "we don't know for sure. This is just a theory that seems to fit our observations so far. It might be the sheer number of deaths. If even a tiny percent of the people killed were able, for whatever reason, to inhabit someone else's corpse and come back as a zombie, the rest of the world would still have been in horrible trouble. And with the communications breakdown, we don't know how many people actually died, or how many zombies have risen."

She waved a hand to indicate the corpses, and as Jill looked out at them again she saw a faint red aura tumble through the wall and into a body. It groaned and started moving.

"Let's move this conversation inside," said Dr. Harding. "No reason to rile them up until we have another full class."

They suited actions to words, locking and barring the steel door behind them. Dr. Harding led the way into a lounge and poured cups of broth for all of them.

"All right," Jill said after taking a too-hot sip. "I can buy the idea of... calming the spirits. If your theory is correct, then just destroying the bodies like most people do only sends the spirits to a new corpse, maybe even angrier than before. And people are always dying, so it's not like there's a shortage. But why yoga?"

"That was Ananda's idea. And thank goodness she came up with it!"

Ananda blushed. "I taught yoga... before. A lot of my students would come in after the work day with these dark, muddy, angry auras – some of them as dark as a zombie's, though not as intense." She looked at Jill, seeming to want confirmation.

Jill nodded, though she had never seen an aura before the rising.

"So... They would have these dark, muddy auras before class started, but as they got into the vinyasa flow, they always started letting go of whatever was bothering them, and their auras would get lighter and lighter, and clearer, if you know what I mean."

Jill nodded again. She could imagine, after watching the zombies' transformation.

Ananda shrugged. "I was lucky; I've been in Refuge almost since the beginning. So I guess I was able to feel a bit more sympathetic towards the zombies than most people, able to wonder what it was that made their auras so gross. And I thought maybe I could help them the same way I used to help my students."

She paused, so Jill nodded again.

"Dr. Harding set up the first experiment. It worked, and now we're just trying to lay as many spirits to rest as we can. And since you can see the auras, you'll be able to lead classes too, as soon as you learn the poses. Some of the others can teach classes too, but they need me – or you now – to watch and tell them when the auras change. They can tell when the spirits leave, but not when they're ready for savasana."

Jill nodded slowly. The "class" had gone on for hours before the auras reached purple. Knowing the auras had changed, and to what color, must help the instructors to keep up their motivation, as well as knowing when to lay the zombies to rest.

"All right, I'm in," she said. "But that reminds me – all through the class, you were shouting out the poses in English. But that last one, you keep calling it 'savasana.' Why? Doesn't it translate?"

"Oh..." Ananda blushed and shifted her weight uneasily. "Before, we called it that because the translation made some students uneasy. Now... It just seems too ironic, and I wouldn't want to risk offending them. Savasana means Corpse Pose."

##

##

## ~~*~~

##

##

## A Time to Laugh

##

Oh when the dead, go marching on...

Oh when the dead go marching on...

Oh how I dread to be in that number...

When the dead go marching on...

It had been over a week since he'd last seen a living person - or a dead one, for that matter - so when Todd first heard the music, he thought he was hallucinating. He skidded to a stop and swung off his bicycle, and after a quick look around for immediate threats, he took off his pack and dug out a half-full bottle of water. While he sat and drank, the music went on, with the slightly tinny sound of a recording playing from sub-par speakers.

But when the Lord, welcomes them home...

Oh when the Lord welcomes them home...

Oh then at last we'll have peace of our own...

Oh when the Lord welcomes them home...

It went on from there, verse after verse of new words to the old tune. It wasn't good, but it wasn't old, either. Maybe someone would have written a song about zombies in the before-time - in fact, they probably had - but the tone of this song was totally serious. There was none of the joking or wordplay that he and his friends would have put in, back when they were just a bunch of bored college kids playing at planning for the zombie apocalypse.

Which meant living humans had recorded that song. Living humans with enough spare electricity to play music to the prairie dogs and the empty road.

Maybe they would even have a sense of humor.

That was one thing he and his friends had never planned for - the deadly seriousness of everyone left alive. While Todd would rather laugh than cry, everybody else seemed to think it was inappropriate, or somehow disrespectful. Not just that, but even a hint of joking made most strangers give him what he'd come to think of as "the look," and encourage him to be on his way. It was like wanting to smile was some sort of mark, branding him as untrustworthy.

He sighed, wishing for at least the millionth time that any of his friends had survived. Well, Chris had, but he'd gone as serious as the rest of them after the rising, so he hardly counted.

It was Chris who'd warned him things were going sour, that first time. One last favor to an old friend who couldn't adjust to the new reality of the world, he said. It meant that Todd was ready, at least, when the "elders" asked him to leave. He didn't say a word, just took the sparse bag of supplies they handed him and walked out. Then he retrieved the mountain bike and stash of supplies that he had been building up since Chris's warning, and left for real.

Since then, he'd just kept moving. On good days, he told himself he was on a quest to find the place where he belonged, but on bad days, he just desperately wished for any sort of human company. Solitude got on his nerves, made him stupid. He'd approach anybody once he'd been alone long enough. Once, he had even tried talking to a couple of zombies and almost gotten himself killed.

The song wound down while he sat remembering, and a new one started up. He didn't recognize the tune, but the words seemed to be all about peace, harmony, and waiting patiently for the dead to finish their business. There were several references to the "Great Spirit," and "Earth Mother." Combined with the "Lord" of the first song, it seemed to indicate that the musicians were at least multi-denominational. That was a good sign. Religious nuts were ok, as long as they didn't expect everyone else to buy into their dogma.

"You know you're going to go check them out," he told himself. "So just get up and do it. It doesn't matter how bat-shit crazy they might be - they're people, and if you don't see some living people soon, you're going to be the bat-shit crazy one."

With that, he heaved himself to his feet, slung his backpack over the bike seat, and started walking in the direction of the music.

A third song had started and was winding down by the time he reached the source. It was a tiny cinder-block building, in the middle of nowhere, with an industrial steel door in one wall and a pair of speakers duct taped to the roof. There was no sign of people, beyond the music, but there was a nondescript button next to the door that looked suspiciously like a doorbell.

Todd raised a hand, index finger out, then lowered it again. Then he paced back a few feet to look at the structure again. The roof sloped down into the ground at the back, so there was obviously more of it belowground. It looked military, to his unpracticed eye. He and the few military types he had met got along even worse than he and normal survivors. But he couldn't quite see a military group playing folk music at their front door.

He paced back to the door, finger out and hovering over the doorbell. Then his hand dropped to his side again.

"What is wrong with you?" he scolded himself. "They won't kill me, because then they'd have a zombie on their hands. The worst that can happen..." He stopped, remembering how many times things had gone worse than his worst-case planning, then shrugged. "Ok, the worst that is _likely_ to happen is that they'll hate me and kick me out. And the best that could happen is that they're nice people who appreciate a bit of clowning around, and we all live happily ever after."

He stared at the door, and his hand didn't move. Normally, people spotted him around the same time that he spotted them. Then it was just a matter of walking up and saying hi. Staring at that plain metal door, though, he felt like he had his hand on the lid of Schrodinger's box. When he hit that doorbell, all the possibilities would collapse, and he would be left with one reality to deal with. And metaphorically speaking, all of his cats had been dead so far.

"Coward," he muttered. "Just do it!" He scuffed his feet, glared at the doorbell, and then jabbed a finger into it.

Immediately, he felt better. The die was cast. The box was about to be opened. He laid a hand against the door, wondering what kind of cat he would find waiting inside.

It shifted under his hand, and he jumped back, watching as it opened inward and revealed a young woman who met his eyes and smiled.

"Would you like to come in?" she asked, with an edge of humor to her voice that made him like her immediately.

"I would love to come in, miss..."

"Ellen," she said, holding out a hand.

He took it in his and was pleased when her grip was strong and confident. "I'm Todd."

Ellen gave his hand one brisk shake before letting it go, and after a moment he realized he was making a fool of himself by just standing there staring into her eyes. He shook himself, though he couldn't wipe the silly grin off his face. "Sorry," he said. "I was expecting... well, I didn't know what to expect, but it wasn't the most beautiful woman I've ever seen asking me if I'd like to come in."

At her laugh, he grinned even wider. He hadn't heard a laugh like that since before. "No, really," he said, hoping for another. "I would have been less surprised by some grizzled old ogre coming to chase me away, or even an enclave of civilized zombies offering me tea!"

The girl bit her lips, and though he thought he could still see a hint of laughter in her eyes, her voice was serious. "You mustn't call them zombies here," she said. "David considers it disrespectful."

His heart sank. "Ahh, so David's the ogre I was expecting."

She smacked his arm, suppressing a smile. "He's a very nice man. Just a little... serious. Come on. We shouldn't stand here with the door open all day."

He followed her with a smile in spite of his sinking hopes.

"So why were you standing there at the door so long, just looking at it and never ringing the bell?"

"You have cameras set up?" He hadn't seen them, but he hadn't been looking for them either.

She nodded. "This used to be a missile silo. David bought it to build a commune when the government got rid of the missiles. It's the perfect place to ride out a natural disaster. Securely built, underground, largely self-sufficient even before everything that happened. Plus, the town used to give him a tax break to keep the place stocked as an emergency shelter. We've got enough canned goods and fresh water to keep a thousand people going for almost a year."

"A thousand! You have a thousand people here?" His hopes skyrocketed again. With that many people in one place, there had to be a place for him!

But Ellen was shaking her head already. "That's what they stocked for. What we've got is twenty-two, twenty-three now that you're here." She graced him with another brilliant smile. "But you still haven't told me why you didn't ring the bell. Were you afraid?"

"Have you ever heard of Schrödinger's cat?"

"Umm..."

"It's a... well, sort of a theory, in physics. I don't really understand any of the math behind it, but it boils down to the idea that if you have a situation with multiple possible outcomes, the outcome isn't determined until someone observes it. In other words, the act of observing something has an effect on that which is observed."

"Okay..."

"The original thought experiment was written by this guy Schrödinger, who postulated a cat, inside a box, with a vial of poison and a trigger that had a fifty-fifty chance of breaking the vial and killing the cat."

"That's horrible!"

"Well, he didn't actually do it, it's just a thought experiment. It only really works on the quantum level, anyway, since a cat is complex enough to observe itself."

"It's still horrible."

Todd grimaced, but soldiered on, hoping to salvage some of her good will. "Sorry. But the point is, that with the cat and the vial in the box, and the observer on the outside, there's no way to know whether the cat is dead. And on a quantum level, the cat is neither dead nor alive, or both dead and alive, until you open the box and observe it."

Ellen snorted. "So it's undead?"

He laughed, and then laughed again because it felt so good. "Not exactly," he said, grinning. "It's just uncertain."

"So you didn't want to ring the doorbell, because then we'd answer and be either dead or alive?"

She was smiling again, and his heart soared. "You could put it that way. All of the different possibilities, of what might be behind that door, would disappear and be replaced by one single reality for me to deal with. It was an intimidating prospect."

"So by you observing us, we become what we are? That seems a bit egotistical."

Todd couldn't tell if she was amused or disapproving. He shook his head, partly to try to get a grip on himself. "It only really works on the quantum level," he said. "After all, you're an observer too. You might as well say that by you opening that door and observing me, I became what I am."

"Interesting perspective." Ellen jogged a few steps ahead and pointed around the corner at the end of the long sloping hall they had been following. "What do you think you'll find behind this door?"

Todd turned the corner and gasped.

Where the entry and tunnel had been unrelieved gray-painted concrete, the wall before him looked like something out of Tolkien's Middle Earth. The wall was covered in rounded stones in a variety of earthen colors, from a rich ochre red through several browns to a slate gray that had as much in common with the gray of the tunnel as a fresh baked loaf of bread had with a stale cracker. The door itself was made of beautifully gnarled wood, the texture of the rings and knots polished to a smooth relief that felt like silk under his hand when he touched it. A lamp of multicolored glass hanging above the door added to the fairy-tale feel.

"It's beautiful," he breathed, stroking the wood of the door.

"Just wait 'til you see inside," said Ellen. "Welcome to the Grove."

The living space beyond might have been a military installation at one time, but now it was more comfortable and colorful than he could have imagined. Sofas and chairs seemed to proliferate in every room they went through, well-strewn with colorful blankets and pillows. A few people looked up from books or conversations as they passed by, but Ellen didn't stop to introduce him to anyone until they arrived in a larger room with bookcase-lined walls and a square of sofas and easy chairs in the center.

She led Todd to one of the easy chairs, where a scrawny man with long gray hair and a colorful homespun tunic rose to shake his hand.

"David, this is Todd, a peaceful visitor to our Grove. Todd, this is David, our leader and guide in these troubling times."

The words had the feel of a ritual, like these were the words that were supposed to be said, rather than a simple introduction. Todd wondered what his part was supposed to be. He stuck out a hand, and David took it in both of his with a surprisingly soft touch. Todd immediately softened his own grip, not wanting to offend. "A pleasure," he said.

David released his hand, and gripped Todd's head just as lightly. "Blessed be the guest who comes in peace," he intoned.

"Blessed be," came the soft response from Ellen and the handful of other people in the room.

"You are welcome to our Grove," David said, sitting and gesturing to the empty chair beside him.

Todd sat, wishing he could go talk to Ellen some more instead. He had the feeling that David wouldn't appreciate his sense of humor at all.

"Tell us of the world outside, honored guest. Do the dead still walk?"

"Say what?" The words slipped out, though he could have kicked himself when he heard them. "Sorry. It's just... been a while since I've had the chance to talk to anyone but myself." In truth, his emotions felt like a roller coaster, but they always did when he found people again. "Um... I haven't seen any z... any of the dead in your vicinity."

"But you have seen them recently?"

"Well, yes. Actually, I saw a man rise just a week or so ago."

"Indeed? And what did he die of?"

"Ahh..." Todd really didn't want to go into details. It wasn't exactly his doing, but he had been the one who slipped that woman the sleeping pills. "He offended a lady," he said, hoping the other man would leave it at that.

"I take it the offence was grave," David said. "It is unfortunate that our living brethren still number such monsters in their midst. Until the species is cleansed of such things, I fear the dead will continue to walk, and reap the innocent along with the guilty."

"Mmm." David seemed friendly enough, but the semi-religious feel to everything he said was grating on Todd's nerves. He was trying to watch his tongue, but it probably wouldn't be long before something slipped out that made them send him on his way. He glanced at Ellen, and determined to try to make it at least one day. It'd be a pity to leave without at least one more conversation with her.

He answered a few more questions as carefully as he could, and listened passively when David went on at length about sin and virtue, the state of the world, and the perfection of their little corner of it. He managed not to yawn or say anything snarky, but his eyes felt a little glazed over by the time a gong rang out, interrupting them.

David rose, gesturing for Todd to accompany him as the others filed into another room. "You will join us for a meal, of course," he said. "You are welcome to stay as a guest until the next full moon, at which time you may petition to join us as a member of the Grove, or continue on your journey if you prefer."

"I thank you for your hospitality," Todd said, surprised and pleased by the offer. Most groups either assumed he was joining up to do their bidding, or expected him to be on his way after a single night's rest, if that.

The meal surprised him too. Traveling, most of what he ate was canned food that he scavenged whenever he passed through a town. He wasn't really familiar with wild edibles, and didn't have the first idea of how to hunt, though once in a while he came across a garden with vegetables that he recognized. This was a hash of potatoes with some sort of gamey meat, crisp fresh green beans, and salty canned corn, all well-seasoned with pepper, salt, and spices. When Ellen set a cup of hot coffee at his elbow, he felt like he had died and gone to heaven, or maybe back to the time before the flu and the rising.

He complimented the meal and the cooks and the whole commune vociferously, and didn't turn down a second helping when it was offered. The smiles on the faces around him warmed his heart, and made him think that maybe he could make this work after all, and fit in with these people. The food alone was worth giving it a try, at least. And if all the people here were as willing to laugh as Ellen, then he might have found a home after all.

After dinner, he insisted on helping to wash the dishes, and soon had the two teens he was working with giggling at the story of his last flat tire. It might have been a horrible day, but it really had been an awesome comedy of errors, and he'd been dying to share the story. He always felt better about disasters once he could laugh about them. "So then," he said, "After the second spare blew out, I finally realized that there was something stuck on the inside of the tire. And what do you think it was?"

"A rock?"

"It was a thumb tack. An honest to goodness thumb tack, just as if I was in a cartoon. The only thing that could have made it more ridiculous is if I'd slipped on a banana peel."

Suddenly, the girl next to him stiffened and cleared her throat. The boy did the same an instant later, practically standing to attention as he looked toward the kitchen doorway.

Todd turned to see David standing there, his face stern with disapproval. His own smile froze on his face. "Hi David," he said, trying not to act as nervous as he felt. "I was just telling Kit and Tara here about one of my misadventures on the way here."

"I see that," David said. "But you must be tired from your journey. I am sure that Kit and Tara can handle the rest of the dishes on their own."

The teens rushed to agree, and Todd had no choice but to wipe his hands and follow the older man out.

"Ellen told me that she thought you might need... an introduction to our way of life here, and I see now that she is right." As he spoke, they entered the dining area, and Ellen came to join them. He laid a hand on her shoulder and smiled kindly at Todd. "I know that you are new to us, but I am sure that you would not want to disrupt our peace."

"No, not at all!" Todd shook his head vigorously, wishing now that he hadn't let himself get so comfortable during the meal. If he hadn't started telling stories in the kitchen...

"Good," David said, his voice kind and gentle. "Ellen has volunteered to show you around the Grove, and explain our ways to you. I am sure that with a little effort, you will fit in just fine."

"Thank you sir," Todd said respectfully, his heart sinking. If he had violated an actual rule just by washing dishes and making a couple of kids laugh, he didn't want to fit in here, even for the awesome food.

David nodded beneficently, and Ellen put a hand on Todd's arm to lead him away. "Let me show you the facilities first. I'm sure you must be needing them."

Once they were well down the corridor, he glanced around to make sure they were alone and asked, "What did I do?"

"What do you mean?"

"That bit about disrupting the peace, and fitting in... I was just telling the kids a little story while we washed dishes!"

"I'm sure it was nothing," Ellen said. "David takes things seriously, but you don't have to be afraid of him. He really is as nice as he seems, even if he's a little crunch-fruity."

"A little!" Todd bit his tongue. Being snarky would just get him kicked out sooner, and he really wanted to have another real meal or two before then. "I'm sorry. It was very nice of him to welcome me as a guest," he said, trying to be polite. "When's the next full moon, anyway? A couple of weeks?"

"Ten days. Here we go, let me show you how this works." She showed him the bathing and toilet area, explaining in detail how the water system worked. They had a well, but also used an intricate re-use system, keeping the cleanest water for drinking and cooking, and using the gray water for cleaning and watering the plants in their greenhouse. The toilet didn't use any water at all, but routed waste into a digester that produced heat, clean gas for cooking and power generation, and sterilized fertilizer for the greenhouse.

"I didn't see any sign of a greenhouse above-ground," Todd observed, once he had used the facilities and rejoined her. "Where do you keep it?"

"In the missile silo," she said gleefully, taking him by the hand and leading him down another corridor. They pushed through flaps of plastic into a space that was warm and humid, and filled with the smells of earth and growing things. It was dark, except for the light bleeding in from the corridor, but Todd could see that the original roof had been replaced with thick glass panels. Looking up, he could see a half moon hanging in the black sky, while all around them were tiers of planters. "Impressive," he breathed.

"David wanted to create a fully self-sufficient community, before," Ellen said, taking his hand again and leaning against his shoulder as she looked up at the moon. "Kind of as a proof of concept, to show the rest of the world that it could be done, that we could overcome all our problems with waste and energy and food supply. I guess it all seems kind of silly now. There aren't enough people left to worry about using up the planet."

"No, it's good. It's very good. You don't know what it's like out there. Just having electricity, fresh food, hot cooked meals... This place is like a slice of the world as it used to be."

"But you're not going to stay, are you?"

He turned and met her eyes, surprised that she could tell.

"Why not?" she asked.

He took a step back towards the corridor, watching her face come into the light as she pivoted to follow him. "I just... wouldn't fit here," he said, trying to see what she was thinking by the expression on her face. The way she had bantered with him when she answered the door didn't seem to fit with David's disapproval in the kitchen, but she was evidently trusted to indoctrinate a potentially troublesome newcomer. "I don't think I fit anywhere anymore," he went on, watching her carefully. "I miss living in a world where it's ok to laugh."

Her face worked, but he couldn't tell which emotions were behind it. He just didn't know her well enough yet.

"Come with me," she said after a moment.

She led him back into the corridor, through a winding set of sparsely furnished rooms, and down a side hall to a little office. Once inside, she closed the door behind them and dropped a towel across the crack at the bottom.

Todd looked around silently. Here, the commune's military origin hadn't been so carefully masked. There was a built-in console that took up most of the room with assorted dials and knobs, and the walls were the same dull gray as the entry tunnel. When Ellen pulled two chairs up to the desk, he sat quietly and watched while she fiddled with the dials.

"We have to be quiet," she said. "David doesn't like us listening to their broadcasts." Static gave way to the faint sound of a voice, and she turned another dial to bring the volume up to an audible level.

"Recent newcomers to Refuge report that vigilantes are now roaming the countryside; destroying zombies, aiding travelers, and freeing enslaved women. While we still urge everyone with a secure location to try our zombie-soother methodology, we can only applaud anyone who chooses to aid their fellow humans in these times of widespread lawlessness. Three cheers for the vigilantes!"

As the announcer spoke, it slowly sank in for Todd that this was a live broadcast - that someplace, the survivors didn't just have electricity, but a full radio station.

"What's a zombie-soother?" he asked, but Ellen just shushed him.

"Coming up next is another installment in our classic radio play series, a newly unearthed episode of Johnny's Jaunts!"

A man with a British accent came on, and started recounting a series of the most ridiculous adventures Todd had ever heard, all taking place some time before the advent of the mobile phone. In spite of how dated the material was, he and Ellen were soon holding their hands over their mouths and snickering uncontrollably. By the time Johnny signed off and the radio segued into an hour of classical music, he felt like he had laughed more in the past half-hour than he had since the news of the flu first broke.

"I can't believe David doesn't approve," he said. "Has he heard this stuff?"

Ellen sobered. "David doesn't believe that laughter is appropriate when the world is in the midst of judgment."

"I did get that feeling," Todd said. "So he thinks God sent the zombies? That is so..."

"The divine spirit of nature, but yes, essentially. He doesn't... Look, David is a good man, but his core beliefs before were that nature was divine, and would take care of those who honored her. When the flu hit, the Grove only lost two people, while the town lost eight hundred, and that just confirmed it for him. They were living right. That didn't stop him from helping the townsfolk, or opening his doors to us once the dead rose - not that many of us made it here - but that was just part of living right, helping out your neighbors. But then..."

"With only twenty two people here, I'm guessing something happened."

She sighed. "One of the survivors from town was a bully, and he had a few hangers-on. Enough that they thought they could take over this place, run it the way they wanted. They laughed a lot, and mocked the hippies, and beat David and anyone else who tried to protest. So David's wife Mathilde drugged them, and then we dragged them all up to the desert, and locked them out."

"Mathilde... which one was she?"

"She's dead."

Todd winced. "I'm sorry. I was just thinking she sounds like a very sensible woman."

Ellen nodded. "She was. Sensible, and gentle, and just a beautiful woman, in every way, but also entirely ruthless if you threatened what she loved. I really respected her for that."

Todd waited patiently, watching her stare into space.

Eventually she shook herself and went on. "They woke after a while, and spent hours hammering at the door, until the dead from town came and killed them. After that, we thought things would calm down, that we could just hunker down and enjoy ourselves until the world outside sorted itself out. Mathilde encouraged us to make music, and art, and she told the funniest stories." She smiled fondly, then shook her head, a shadow of fear crossing her face. "But she was pregnant."

Todd waited, but she just hunched her shoulders, looking sick. "Isn't that a good thing?" he asked. "I mean, most of the groups I've met, they're actively trying to breed, and restore the human race." He kept his tone of voice light, trying to coax a smile out of her.

Instead, she shuddered. "It was stillborn," she said.

He shook his head, confused. "I'm sorry to hear that. I know it's always hard on the parents..."

"It died, Todd," she snapped, suddenly staring into his eyes with frightening intensity. "It died, in her womb."

He stared back, trying to understand.

"And then it rose."

His breath caught in his throat, and he sat back, feeling stunned.

Ellen nodded. "It tried to claw its way out. She was in such agony... None of us are doctors, but David carried her to the infirmary, poured a whole bottle of alcohol over her belly, and tried to do an emergency C-section. It was... horrifying. So much blood, and then this tiny body striking out at us. David smashed it against the wall, and one of the other guys finished it off, but then there was Mathilde, with this gaping, bloody hole in her belly, screaming."

She was breathing hard now, holding herself tight. Todd eased closer to put a comforting hand on her shoulder, and wrapped his arms around her when she didn't push him away. "She died," he said, sure of it.

Ellen nodded.

"And then they had to kill her, because she rose as a zombie. Just like her baby."

Ellen nodded again, and broke down into sobs, leaning into him. He stroked her hair, and tried not to think too hard about the amount of damage you had to do to a zombie to make it stop moving. The amount of damage David would have had to do to his wife.

After a while, Ellen sat up, pushing him away and wiping at her eyes. "I'm sorry," she said, "It's just... a hard memory to bear."

"I can imagine," he said. You didn't travel the country these days without accumulating quite a few memories you'd rather not have. He shuddered, and pushed some of his own away. "And I'm sorry," he said. "After something like that, I can see why David wouldn't be interested in laughter, or in anything that might sound like disrespecting the dead."

An unhappy smile twisted her lips. "It's not just that. Before, he thought the Grove had been spared the worst of the horror because they were better, that others had somehow earned what happened to them. That meant that Mathilde and he and the rest of us must have earned what happened to her. It made him... much more serious about avoiding sin and embracing righteous living. Do you know you have to take a vow of celibacy to be a member of the Grove now, even if you're married?"

Todd shuddered, the vision of a baby zombie still vivid in his mind. "I can see why."

"But not just no sex. No oral sex, no masturbation, no kissing. We lost a bunch more people when David announced that. They said they'd send word when they found someplace else that was safe to stay, but no one has ever come back... That was before we started receiving the broadcasts from Refuge. And that's not all. We've got all sorts of weird little rules. No jokes or laughing out loud. No expressions of anger. No wishing for the past."

Todd rolled his eyes. "Ugh. Why not just kill you all and be done with it?" He winced as soon as the words were out of his mouth. "Sorry."

She laughed humorlessly, and let her head drop down against the chair back, staring up at the ceiling. "Sometimes I do feel like I'm dead already."

"Except when you sneak away to listen to Johnny's Jaunts," he said, patting her knee. "Right?"

She rolled her head to smile at him, her cheek resting against the chair back. "If David knew, he'd disown me. But it's like you said. I miss being able to laugh."

"You could come with me," he said, the words slipping out before he could think about them. Then he remembered the woman from last week, who preferred dying at a zombie's hands to letting her abuser live. "No, that's a stupid idea," he said, shaking his head. "Forget I said anything."

"Why?" Ellen demanded, grabbing his chair and forcing him to face her when he would have swiveled away. "Why's it a stupid idea?"

"Because it's not safe. God knows I'm not strong enough to protect you - I'm barely managing to keep myself alive, and that's mostly because the bike gives me a head start when I need to run. And I'm not even running to anyplace, just away, over and over."

"We could go to Refuge."

He blinked. "The radio people?"

Ellen nodded, pulling a map out of a drawer and spreading it open. "They give their location sometimes. I've planned it out so many times, but I was always afraid to set out alone."

Todd let out a low whistle, looking at the highlighted routes on the map. "That's about five hundred miles..." Unfolding the map further, he traced his own path to the Grove. He hadn't realized how much distance he'd really traveled. "But it's doable," he added.

"I know it's dangerous," Ellen said, leaning her head against his shoulder. "But I'm willing to take the chance, if you are. For a chance to laugh out in the open instead of hiding away in this little room. What do you say?"

It was Schrödinger's cat all over again. If they set out on this journey, they might never finish it. They might fall afoul of zombie hordes, or human predators. But on the other hand, the cat might be alive. They might make it to Refuge, find a new life with people who weren't afraid to laugh, and really live rather than just surviving. And in the meantime, he wouldn't be alone any more...

He wrapped his arm around her shoulders again and hugged her tight. "Promise you'll laugh at my jokes?"

Ellen laughed out loud. "I promise!"

##

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## ~~*~~

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## Life Goes On

##

Felicia sat and watched her grandmother breathe.

The rattling gasp in, followed by the slow multi-tonal wheeze of her exhale, then the agonizing pause before the next gasp. With each pause, Felicia held her own breath, wondering if it would be the last.

She knew she should be singing, keeping her voice warm in case that last breath came during tonight's vigil, but she couldn't help it. She listened, and tried to breathe in time with Gran's irregular pace, as if she could keep the old woman breathing by sheer will alone. Part of it was fatigue, she knew. After three nights of vigil, she was starting to wear down. Gregory had offered to take the night vigil, and she knew that she should let him, but she couldn't help that either.

It was her grandmother, after all, and she had promised.

"Ten soothings, after I die," Gran had insisted. "Just like we did for your mother. Then you can break this old body down and burn it."

Gregory said he understood, but he didn't have the patience for the soothing. His people generally just disabled the body as soon as they died, and burned it the same day. "Why ten times?" he had asked when her mother died. "Why not one? Or twenty, for that matter?"

"One's not enough," Gran had said, "And twenty would be too much. Life has to go on, after all."

And life would go on, even with the old woman gone. Even if it would be a much poorer life, without her funny stories. Felicia smiled, remembering the long-winded lecture her grandmother had given when the children ran up to her with some ancient device of plastic and wires, and asked what it was.

She held her breath, trying to hold back her tears as well. "Thanks, Gran," she whispered. "Thanks for taking such good care of us. Now it's my turn, and I'll do my best, my very best to take good care of you."

"You know I have peace in my heart," the old woman had told Felicia a week ago, when she had insisted on moving to the sick room. Even then, she hadn't been able to walk without help. "That's why you won't be seeing me back here once I've shuffled off. Those other ones, though, they've lost the way. Too full of anger and whatnot. That's why you've got to soothe them, even when they're using these old hands to try to kill you. Help them to move on, like a dead person should, and one of these days there won't be any more. They'll all be soothed away."

"Yes Gran," she'd said obediently. At that point, she still assumed that Gran would get over this cold, just like she had the year before, and the year before that. Now, though...

Gasp. Wheeze. Pause.

She was going to miss Gran so much...

She grimaced at the thought, and the raw emotion that it released. She doubled over, her body echoing her internal struggle to keep her sorrow contained, and gasped for breath, trying not to sob. _Strong_ , she thought. _I have to be strong, for Gran_.

When the time came, she had to be ready. Song, storytelling, a soothing voice. Just like soothing a fussy child, the important part was to keep going, no matter how much your own heart was breaking. There would be time enough to cry when the soothing was done.

After a moment, she had herself under control again. Her breathing slowed and deepened, and she hummed a little under her breath to warm up her vocal cords.

Then she realized that something was missing.

She held her breath to listen, and shivered at the silence. No gasp. No wheeze.

But no moan either. No movement, nor any sign of Gran's body getting out of bed to attack her. Zombies always attacked. It was why the sick room was designed with a barred door, so that the living could retreat to safety while still doing their best to soothe the dead. But there was nothing.

"G-Gran?" Her voice cracked a little, and she swallowed against the sudden dryness in her throat. "Gran!"

There was no response from the still body in the bed.

Did she dare check for a pulse? But then if Gran died while she was checking... Instead, she started to sing, softly. She didn't move to bar the door, not yet, but she stayed in her chair, well out of reach of her grandmother's body. When Gregory came to spell her in the morning, she would check, if there was still any need. In the meantime, the singing was as much a comfort to her as to whatever soul might occupy Gran's body now.

***

Dawn broke, sunlight from the windows slowly bleeding in to wash out the light of her candle, until it was bright enough for her to snuff it.

A thump from the other end of the house told her that Gregory and the kids were up, and on their way out to gather eggs and milk the goat. She sat a little straighter in her chair, and switched from the lullaby that had gotten her through most of the night to a more cheerful song. Soon enough, the morning chores would be finished. Then her husband would be along to share breakfast with her and see how the night had gone.

She wasn't sure what she would tell him.

Most of an hour later, he strode in, tray in hand. "You gave me a bit of a turn," he said as he set it down. "I heard you singing, and thought she must have passed."

Felicia stopped singing, thought for a moment, then shrugged. "I think she did," she said.

She almost smiled at the way he jumped to look at the bed, then glared back at her as if she was playing a joke. She inclined her head though, indicating the bed, and after a moment he stepped closer to look at the body lying there so still.

He glanced at Felicia, and she nodded at the expression on his face, standing to take hold of the sledgehammer. When he saw that she was ready, he reached out a hand and held it in front of Gran's mouth and nose, feeling for any sign of breath. A moment later he slid it down under her chin to feel for a pulse.

"Anything?" Felicia asked.

He shook his head and pulled the blankets back so that he could hold his ear to the old woman's chest. Then he sat up and shook his head. "Nothing," he said. "No sound of breath, no heartbeat, no gut noises. Her skin's even starting to feel cold. I've never seen anything like it."

"Like _Romeo and Juliet_ ," Fellicia said, smiling sadly. They had found the old book of plays a few years ago, exploring the abandoned farmhouse they had decided to make their own. "Remember how much Gran laughed when we asked her why they thought Juliet was dead, if she was lying still on the ground and not trying to kill anyone?"

"I remember." Gregory smiled back.

Felicia lowered the sledgehammer and walked over to slip an arm around his waist, looking down at her grandmother's body. "Gran always said that if we soothed enough zombies, eventually the dead would rest in peace."

"What do we do now?"

"Build the pyre, I guess. We can leave her in here while we get it ready."

"We should let the neighbors know." Gregory said. "This changes everything."

"True..." Felicia grinned, remembering how Gran had gone on and on the night they finally burned her mother's body. At the time, she had felt a little scandalized, but now... "I think Gran would want us to have a party. We'll invite all the neighbors, everyone we know. They'll want to see her body, see for themselves that she's not rising. And then we can celebrate, maybe start a new tradition."

"Or renew an old one. My Dad used to tell me about Irish wakes, where everyone got drunk and told funny stories all night long. He said they liked to send the dead off with a bang."

"This was your Dad," Felicia said, laughing a little as she wiped at her eyes. "Are you sure he wasn't talking about explosives?"

Gregory grinned. "Could be. Either way, let's make it a party Gran would approve of."

##

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## ~~*~~

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## Short Story Collections by Anthea Strezze

Refuge: Tales From a Zombie Apocalypse

When a terrorist attack unleashed a new strain of the bird flu, people worried.

When the resulting pandemic killed millions, it felt like the end of the world.

Then the dead started to rise...

The Trouble With Wishes

Everyone wishes sometimes - for things to be different, or easier, or better. But when a wish is granted, can you ever get what you really want?

Zombie Variations

What's it like to be a zombie?Do they still feel love and fear? Or nothing but a ravening hunger for the brains of the living?

## Coming soon:

Transformations

Self-transformation - what sort of motivation does it take to destroy who you are, in the hope of who you might become?

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## About the Author

Anthea Strezze believes in nurturing the sense of wonder, and strives to write stories that her readers can really connect with and find echoes of themselves and their lives in. She's just as likely to write a story about werewolves washing dishes as mages doing battle with ancient evil (more likely, actually), and loves writing both mundane stories with a taste of the fantastic, and fantastic stories with a hint of the mundane. She lives in New England with her husband and cat, and maintains a blog at <http://AntheaStrezze.com/blog>.
