I reach her too late.
By the time my feet carry me to the girl's broken body, the feast is already over. What's left of her is covered in other corpses—zombies stacked three, four deep, locked in place by instinct. No one's pushing. No one's pulling. Just pressing. A slow-motion mosh pit with no music. Just rot and silence.
I don't grab. I don't claw. I just… press.
It's grotesque. My body leans forward like it thinks that'll help, like pressing against a dozen others will magically make food appear. But there's no programming for shoving fellow zombies aside. No aggression for rivals. Just hunger and mass.
So I'm stuck. Smushed between backs and spines and shoulders, straining toward flesh I never wanted to eat in the first place.
And then, just as suddenly—it stops.
No signal. No command. Just release. The zombies around me pull back like a tide rolling out. The heap unwinds, unpiling, one shuffle at a time. And there she is.
The girl.
Her body twitches. Her eyes flicker open—cloudy, pale, empty.
And then she moans.
Low and broken.
One of us.
I want to say something. I want to tell her I'm sorry. That she fought. That Mark died fast. That she mattered.
But all I can do is watch.
She joins the horde without hesitation. Her walk is awkward. Her left arm doesn't move. Her jaw hangs slightly open. But she's with us now. A dead girl, led by hunger, surrounded by monsters who don't know her name.
I do, though.
Not her real one. But I call her Archer.
It's the best I can do.
We move on.
The forest stretches again—long shadows, cool air, damp leaves sticking to feet that don't notice. My body's quiet now. Sated. The same kind of quiet that comes after a meal you didn't enjoy but needed anyway.
I don't think I'll ever stop feeling sick.
Hours pass. Or maybe just minutes stretched by monotony. The trees get thicker again, taller. Pines this time. Darker trunks, closer together. The forest closes in like it's trying to hide something.
And that's when I see them.
A hundred meters off—maybe more—watching from the trees.
The family.
I recognize the father and the son instantly. The dad's white beard, shotgun, calm eyes like still water. But now he's joined by two more: a little girl, maybe six or seven, clinging to his side, and a woman—beautiful, brunette, somewhere in her thirties. She's far too radiant for this world. Like someone cut her out of a vintage postcard and glued her into an apocalypse.
The mother rests a hand on her daughter's head.
The father stands tall.
The woman… watches us.
All four are quiet. Still. Expressionless.
Like statues.
Like ghosts.
I name them the Hendersons.
They look like the kind of family that used to bake pies, mow lawns, attend church. Like they're here on accident—like the world ended around them, and they just never noticed. I don't know why "Henderson" fits, but it does. The surname feels older. Worn-in. Like something you'd find on a faded mail box at the end of a gravel driveway.
They watch us shuffle by, heads tilted just slightly. I think they came because of the noise. The screams. The blood.
But they're too late.
We're done here.
Then we notice them.
Not all at once. It starts with Jacket. His head turns first. Then a few others, Red included. Then Tyson (the colossal asshole). Then the stragglers, which included me.
The herd reorients.
One hundred meters. Straight ahead.
We move toward the Hendersons.
Slow. Relentless. Predictable. The ones at the front of us must have smelled them.
I scream inside. Don't. Please. Not them too.
The little girl tugs at her mother's dress.
The woman kneels. Kisses her daughter's black hair.
And then the boy, his presumed sister, steps forward.
"I'll stall them," he says, like he's announcing a chore. Like he's taking out the trash.
His mother grabs his wrist. "Be careful."
He nods. Reaches into his jacket.
And pulls out a kazoo.
My brain freezes.
What?
He puts it to his lips and blows.
BWWWWAAAAAAAAHHHH.
It's high-pitched, nasal, the kind of sound that drills into every undead ear in a five-mile radius. The herd jerks. Heads swivel. Groans bubble.
Then he turns and walks away, kazoo wheezing in bursts. Not fast. Not scared. Just… leading.
And we follow.
Holy shit, we follow.
The dad nods, seemingly confident in his son's abilities. He and the rest of the family retreat into the woods, as if they're returning home from a picnic. It's so disturbingly casual.
I want to cry.
He's just a kid.
A kid.
And yet here he is, blowing a toy and guiding thirty corpses like a sleepwalker with a baton. We shuffle after him in a lopsided arc, pulled by sound, by instinct, by hunger we don't understand.
He leads us around a bend.
Past a few birch trees.
Into denser woods.
I lose sight of him briefly.
Then—
Thump.
A zombie in front of me vanishes.
One step, they're there. The next, they're gone. No groan. No scream. Just… gone.
And then another.
And another.
I shuffle forward. The trees thin just slightly—and that's when I see it.
A pit.
About six feet deep. Maybe eight. It's not wide, but it's just big enough to swallow the unwary. The bottom's lined with jagged metal—rebar, pipes, maybe even old fence posts. A zombie lies sprawled across the spikes, impaled through the gut and thigh. It's still moving, of course. Still groaning. But stuck. Hopeless.
Another one falls in beside it.
Another.
It's a damn minefield.
Dozens of pits hidden beneath leaves and branches. Each one a metal maw waiting to catch us.
And we're walking right into them.
I try to stop. Try to turn. But my body keeps moving. Step after step. The boy's kazoo squeals ahead, cheerful and cruel.
I'm going to fall.
I'm going to get stuck.
And I can't.
I can't spend the rest of my second life trapped in a hole, twitching, starving, surrounded by moaning echoes and the smell of my own decay.
Please, I beg.
Not like this.
Don't let this be how it ends.