Content Warning: Violence

When I was eight years old, I asked my parents if they were afraid of anything. Like many young kids, I’d always assumed that adults feared nothing, that it was an emotional state reserved only for childhood, and I would one day also grow out of such a silly disposition. I’m not sure, then, what prompted such an inquiry. 

My mother had been sitting on the couch with a book balanced on her legs, my dad around the corner in the kitchen preparing dinner. She set her book aside and pulled me onto her lap, wrapping me in her arms as I sat on the soft padding of her thighs. She had already changed out of her work clothes, but the scent of lavender Febreze pods from her office still permeated as she hugged me close, stuck to her blonde waves.

“Do you remember last summer when you were learning to ride your bike,” she began, “and you accidentally steered onto the road as a car was coming?”

I nodded, recalling the moment my trembling hands guided me onto the street, the heart-stopping panic when I noticed the front bumper of an SUV coming my way. The driver thankfully noticed me and swerved out of the way. My dad was on me in an instant, hugging me close to his chest, my mom joining a moment later with shaky breaths heaving from her lungs.

“That’s what I’m afraid of,” she continued, tucking a strand of loose hair behind my ear. “I’m afraid that you will be taken from me.” Her voice, usually warm and soothing, suddenly became very grim. “I want you to live a long and full life; that’s why I do my best to protect you.” She paused, her dark eyes studying me. I held my breath, her gaze suddenly a weight crushing my body. 

Her words came out of her mouth in pained whispers, as if she were struggling to say them: “My biggest fear is that I will be there to say goodbye to you. Do you understand me?”

“Sasha,” came my dad’s voice from the kitchen, “he’s only eight.”

But I understood. I nodded again, my mouth full of cotton. She kissed the top of my forehead, her lips wet from tears I hadn’t noticed running down her face until she pulled away. I climbed off her lap, bones like lead underneath my skin, retreating wordlessly to my room. 

Her words played in my head nine years later as I stood over the plots of freshly unearthed dirt before me, scooped into haphazard piles like a kid had been playing with sand on the playground. I’d worried we didn’t have time to do better. It was pitiful, really, without so much as a photograph or a bouquet to adorn them with, just a few scattered dandelions we’d plucked from the surrounding grass.

I couldn’t bring myself to cry. I was too scared to, my tears replaced by a bitter taste on the back of my tongue. “I never realized,” I whispered to the dirt, “that preventing your greatest fear meant I would have to see it with the both of you.”

I craned my neck back to glance at Sadie. She stood with her back to me a few yards away. The sun was setting, transforming her into a shadow against the trees, though even in the spectral twilight I could make out the gun she held in her hand. I hated it, hated knowing that we would have to carry them around now for protection from them. From those things.

We drove to this campground in silence. Our families used to take us here during the summers. It was the only place we could think that might be safe. Sadie stood guard while I said my goodbyes, just as I had done for her as she grieved her parents. She had been the one to suggest this, saying we could use some kind of closure. I wished we had their bodies, that we could give them a proper burial rather than the pathetic mounds of unadorned dirt we threw together in a fit. But they were back in our hometown, corpses rotting against the floorboards of Sadie’s home, probably mangled and strewn about as if scavenged by rabid dogs.

I shook away the thought, turning my head back toward the makeshift shrines. “We made it out,” I croaked, anguish stuck in my throat. “Thank you for saving us.” I stepped closer, placing my hands atop the piles. “We’ll survive. For you.”

The sky was getting darker. I turned away and dragged myself toward Sadie with heavy feet. She turned to me at the sound of my steps, the whites of her eyes visibly bloodshot even in the feeble evening haze. I knew she’d want me to talk, so I kept my head low, my eyes trained on my shoelaces.

“Let’s go,” I murmured.

Her face twisted, in sorrow or disgust I wasn’t sure. “Marcus—”

“Let’s go.”

Her sluggish footsteps sounded from behind me. I pulled open the driver’s side door of her dad’s Chevy Malibu and slipped behind the wheel. She followed suit and plopped into the seat next to me, staring straight ahead as she passed me the keys. I started the ignition and pulled out of the campsite, no idea where to go, nor what to do next.

***

Sadie and I scoured the shelves of an empty 7-Eleven just north of the Indiana border, grimacing at the hot dog links still displayed in the long-dead warmer, now home to maggots, flies, and at least a dozen species of mold. To think, we once used to try sweet-talking the cashiers in these places for a six-pack, and now we scavenged them for whatever variety of stale chips and protein bars we managed to find. Most times, we got lucky, and the stores we sifted through were virtually untouched.

I didn’t want to think about how many people that meant were still around.

“Hey, look!” Sadie called from across the aisles. I glanced up at her waving a pack of Trident gum in her hand, grinning ear-to-ear like a toddler.

“You suffering from bad breath?”

“Well, probably,” she admitted with a crooked grin. “But look! It’s the strawberry lime flavor! I haven’t seen this kind in forever.”

I shook my head, returning to the shelves of various protein bars boasting sweet flavors on their packaging in a sad attempt to hide how truly disgusting they tasted. Even just a month of living off of these nutritive snacks was enough to make bile rise in my throat as I eyed them. But neither Sadie nor I knew how to hunt and prepare a live animal for consumption, so protein bars it was.

“Marcus, look at this.”

Her voice came from the front of the store where a cashier would have once stood. I stuffed the last few birthday cake protein bricks in my pocket before making my way to her. She faced away from me, and I could clearly make out the grip of her pistol pulling against her shirt fabric from its resting spot in the back of her jeans. I suddenly became very aware of the metal from my own weapon pressed against my back and shuddered. 

I stood next to her, following her gaze to the countertop where a Slurpee cup sat, the slushy blue drink filling it about halfway. Rivulets of condensation slid down the sides and formed a pool of liquid at the base; a purple straw stuck out the top, the tip sporting teeth marks as if someone had been gnawing on the bright plastic. 

I felt my breath catch in my throat. “Did… did you get the Slurpee machine working?”

I saw her shake her head in my periphery. “It looks new,” she noted. “I think someone has been here.” She stepped toward the counter, reaching a hand out to the cup.

“Don’t touch it!” I snapped.

Her hand jerked back in one swift motion. “Right,” she gasped, “I just… right.”

My eyes swept across the empty store as I pivoted back to the aisles. The lights on both the ceiling and in the coolers were dead, meaning whoever had been here must have been carrying a power generator. I shifted my gaze around the store, checking for any other signs that someone was there. All was still.

“We should keep moving,” I said. “I’m not too thrilled about the idea of running into people.”

I strode toward the front door, thinking Sadie was close behind. When I didn’t hear her footsteps following, I turned back around to the counter. She was still beside it, staring at the disposed drink with intense fascination. She glanced back at me, brows furrowed, azure eyes squinting in contest.

“Do I get any say in this?” she scoffed. She folded her arms in front of her chest, her gaze holding mine unwaveringly. I tried not to shiver.

“What?” I snapped. “You want to try finding them?”

“I’m just saying we haven’t seen another human being in a while,” she argued, “and these guys are clearly more well-equipped than we are.” She gestured with her fingers to my pocket stuffed with protein bars. 

“We’ve been doing just fine.”

Sadie rolled her eyes. “C’mon, you and I both can’t stand the thought of eating another one of those disgusting things. You know what I miss? I miss burgers. I wouldn’t mind tagging along with someone who knows how to prepare a cow.”

“So, because they have a power generator, now they know how to make a burger from scratch?” 

She exhaled sharply, that breathy sigh she always did when she was sick of my shit. “Why are you so against this?” She moved her hands to her hips like a parent about to lecture their kid’s bad behavior. “This isn’t about him, is it?”

I felt the heat rise from my neck to my ears. I wanted to lash out at her, scream how dare she bring him up as leverage in an argument. Anger boiled along my skin. Sadie held my eye as if challenging me to refute her. Her stubbornness pissed me off even more, made me want to shout until my voice echoed off the walls and it was the only thing either of us could hear, but I held my tongue. I wasn’t going to win any arguments with her by being loud. Besides, it wasn’t worth attracting any possible unwanted attention. 

“This is about survival,” I said, keeping my voice as steady as I could manage. “That’s what this has always been about. If we do find these people, there’s no guarantee that they’ll be accommodating. What if they don’t want two more mouths to feed? What if we only slow them down? Do you think they’ll still let us tag along if we can’t even be useful to them?”

For the first time during that argument, I saw her body soften, her shoulders and chest deflating. She folded her arms back over her torso, though it was no longer a defensive stance but an act of retreat. She looked like she was hugging herself, and for a moment my heart ached seeing her start to crumble. Sometimes I forgot she was hurting too.

“Sadie, I—”

“No, you’re right,” she mumbled. “I just… I guess I’d like to think that everyone would understand. That this would bring those of us left together.” Her gaze landed on the store windows behind me facing out toward the Michigan streets. We’d just crossed the border yesterday, though it already felt like we had lived lifetimes in these empty stores. “But those things aren’t the only enemies.”

I didn’t say anything; I knew I didn’t need to. We had seen it play out before, memories coming back in flashes of broken bones and gnarled teeth, the bang of the gun, the way his body crumpled in on itself like a dead spider, watery eyes still pleading as he let out his last trembling breath.

“Don’t do that to yourself,” Sadie said. I blinked the memory away. She was looking at me again, arms no longer bracing her body, though her face still looked worn. I offered her a pathetic attempt at a reassuring smile. 

“I’m okay,” I whispered. Neither of us believed it.

***

We decided to camp out in a mattress store down the road, eager for some comfortability after the day’s journey. Sadie’s dad’s car had long since run out of gas, so we’d decided to keep going on foot, traveling across Illinois and up Indiana and finally crossing into Michigan, so our feet were constantly sore and blistered. Sadie’s grandfather had an old lake house off the coast of Lake Huron that we thought might be secluded enough to avoid any further encounters. Though, it had been a while since we ran into anyone, human or otherwise.

After the initial outbreak, Sadie and I bunkered down in my home with both of our parents. None of us had a clue what was going on, only that armored trucks rolled through the neighborhood with military men warning us through their megaphones to get inside and stay there.

The fortress only held for a few days before the creatures broke in. 

Sadie and I debated what to even call them. We had very little to go off of, just that they were people who were sick with… something, according to the federal text alerts that only lasted about a day. We hardly got a good look at them as we were scrambling for the back door, but their throaty howls and the putrid stench of rot emanating from their herd didn’t appear very human to me. Zombies didn’t seem right either; they were much too fast, too resolute to be classified alongside the brainless, undead cannibals I’d seen in movies. We opted for things, a word that encapsulated about as much as we knew.

After that day, it was like everyone disappeared, like some twisted god or higher being snapped its fingers and erased everything. Sadie and I hadn’t even run into another thing since that day, and if it weren’t for the one human we’d met corroborating the events, I’d be inclined to think we made the whole outbreak up, that the shrooms we took at Rhys’s party the weekend before just kicked in late and this was all some cruel hallucination. Maybe the odor wafting through every neighborhood we stumbled across wasn’t rotting bodies; maybe the apocalypse didn’t actually occur on a random Friday in April.

After a sweep of the mattress store and an hour spent barricading the doors with bed frames, darkness had overtaken the sky. Sadie switched on the battery-powered lantern we’d grabbed from her dad’s car. Fortunately for us, her parents liked to spend their weekends camping together, so her dad’s car was packed with some equipment that he kept in his trunk for their get-aways. He had left one hiking backpack that we took turns wearing, a flashlight, a lamp, a flare gun, bug spray, a half-empty bottle of water purification tablets, and some extra batteries. The rest of our supplies we picked up from various shops along our route, our first stop being a store that sold hunting gear.

The soft lantern glow felt comforting. With no power, nightfall meant near-blindness. While the light allowed us some visibility, it also could attract anyone to our location, so we often took turns keeping watch during the night. Even our barricade offered little comfort of protection.

“I’ll take first watch tonight,” Sadie said, twisting the lantern knob between her fingers like a fidget toy. Her eyes glassed over, her mind elsewhere. “I won’t be able to sleep for a bit anyway.”

I felt like I should say something, yet the words turned to dust before they could fully form. I’d known Sadie for most of my life—since we met in preschool and became inseparable—yet I couldn’t think of a single thing to say to her to ease her mind. I guess I should expect that our friendship would take some bizarre twists as we navigated the newness of… this together, but it still felt like I was failing. 

I remembered the promise we made to each other back in middle school. We both had a crush on the same guy and would bicker over who he would go out with if we both asked, though neither of us ever had the courage to approach him. One day, though, he invited Sadie to go with him to the winter formal. I bitterly encouraged her to say yes (I always figured he was straight anyway) but despite her feelings for him, she turned him down. She told me she knew I would build resentment toward her if she had agreed, and that our friendship was more important than a dumb guy. 

I sat myself at the edge of the mattress. “Sades?”

“Hm?”

“It’s still you and me against the world.”

A soft smile played at her lips, the corner of her mouth tugging upward ever so slightly, but enough that I knew she got the message. We look out for each other. Now more than ever with our survival on the line. 

She exhaled in one long, soft breath. “Yeah, yeah,” she mumbled, the gentle grin still painted on her face. I flashed her one back—a real one this time—and laid down on the mattress, letting all the day’s exhaustion overtake me as I drifted to sleep.

***

I awoke to hands gripping my shoulders, shaking my body until the sleep fled my eyes. I saw nothing but pitch blackness, but I sensed it was Sadie who kneeled over me, fingernails digging into my skin. 

I patted her arm to let her know I was awake. I felt her body shift in the darkness, her long hair suddenly tickling my shoulder as she leaned her head toward my ear.

“Someone’s here,” she whispered, barely more than a breath. 

How did someone get in? I thought. “Human or not?” I exhaled back.

“Not sure. I heard footsteps back toward the office and switched the lantern off. I don’t think they know we’re here. Just stay still.”

We held frozen, Sadie kneeling over me as I lay flat on the mattress. I couldn’t help but think how ridiculous we looked, how in some other timeline this would be the pose that caused everyone at school to point fingers and cry ‘I knew it!’ as if we’d been hiding some nefarious romance our whole friendship. Nobody seemed to believe us when we told them we were friends, that I was gay, for crying out loud. Some guys would even nudge me with their elbows, congratulating me for infiltrating the girls’ circle with a wink as if I were employing a twisted strategy to get romantic attention from my best friend. 

Shuffling footsteps sounded throughout the empty store. They seemed closer than Sadie had described, echoing from the back row of mattresses. I held my breath. The footfalls grew closer in even steps. I prayed this was another traveler ambling by his lonesome for a place to crash for the night, that he would find a mattress and let himself fall asleep and Sadie and I could find a way to sneak out without any trouble. 

A sudden blinding light seared my vision, penetrating the darkness. Sadie and I cried out in shock. She leapt off me as I used my palm to rub the red spots out of my vision. 

“I thought someone was here,” a voice sang. “Sorry, didn’t mean to interrupt you lovebirds.”

I blinked away the last of the light and squinted toward the source. A young man, maybe in his late twenties, stood at the back of the row of bed frames, about twenty feet from me and Sadie. He held a heavy-weight flashlight in his hands which he pointed directly at us, the beam casting little light on himself. I barely made out disheveled black hair and pale skin that sagged like melting wax.

I pulled myself off the mattress. “Just getting some rest,” I called to him. “Could you lower your flashlight a little?”

“Oh, sorry!” the man laughed and repositioned the beam. “Haven’t seen people in a while, guess I’m forgetting my manners.”

I glanced over at Sadie, who now stood next to me. Her lips were pressed tight, hand behind her back resting on the gun handle poking out from the waistband of her jeans, a second one—mine—tucked in her back pocket. She must have grabbed it off the mattress next to me before waking me up.

“How’d you get in here?” Sadie asked, her voice lilted so as not to seem accusatory. My nerves felt like they were on fire, burning with anticipation. My fingers were itching to get hold of my gun, but I held back. I didn’t want to insinuate hostility where it might not be needed.

“Oh, got the backdoor key from the owner a while back,” the man said. “Poor guy was stuck hunkering down here when everything happened. Never was going to last long.” He let out a high-pitched laugh, like a squeal. “I guess not everyone made it home.” 

Sadie inhaled a sharp breath, her fingers closing tightly around her pistol. 

“And what about you two?” he continued. “You from around here?”

“We’re… not far,” I eked out. “We didn’t know anyone else would be here, so we can get out of your way.” I forced a friendly smile, hoping he would dismiss us as antagonistic. No matter how harmless he might be, I wasn’t too keen on sticking around.

The man snorted. “How you gonna get out with all those bed frames blocking your exit?”

“Well, we can—”

“Marcus,” Sadie hissed under her breath. “I think he’s sick.”

The smell hit me before I could even question her, the scent of decay that I remembered so well from that day. I fixed my eyes on the man, his cracked teeth gleaming from behind peeled back lips. I inched my hand toward Sadie’s back pocket.

“A barricade is a great way to keep others out,” the man said. “Poor guy who ran this place thought the same thing. Such a pity he had to leave to grab supplies; he didn’t even see us waiting for him out back.” The man let out another squealing laugh. “Well, it took us a while to get this place straightened out again. You aren’t the first travelers to set up shop here for the night.”

The blood in my body ran cold, my heart dropping to my stomach. The realization must have shown on my face, because he began cackling his shrill, hyena-like squawk. I thrust my hand to my gun like a striking serpent, swinging my arm forward in one quick motion and aiming the barrel toward the man. The thing.

He wasn’t like the ones that attacked our family. This guy was intelligent, resourceful. I never even realized they could still talk, let alone set a trap.

“How many of you are there?” I demanded, gun shaking in my trembling hands. Sadie mirrored me, arms outstretched and weapon aimed ahead.

The man shook his head, grinning to himself. “Gosh, I haven’t felt the thrill of the chase since the outbreak. Even my kind didn’t survive long after that. You’ve noticed it too, right? The way nobody is around? We’re like the dinosaurs all over again.”

“Marcus, we have to kill him.”

“What if there are more?” I hissed. “We might attract attention.”

“Then what the fuck is the point of carrying a gun around?” she snapped, voice rising loud enough for the intruder to hear.

In a split second, he began sprinting down the aisle, eyes trained on me and Sadie, crazed smile pulling his skin taut across his face. I felt my body move on its own, muscles straining, fingers pulling the trigger before my mind could catch up. His flashlight fell from his hands as he doubled over, clattering toward us in a spinning motion, the shaft of light dancing across the walls. Sadie lunged for it, facing the beam toward our attacker. He clutched his lower abdomen, his body twitching and convulsing as his blood began to pool onto the floor around him. 

“Let’s go!” Sadie cried, shouldering our backpack. My feet felt glued to the floor. I just sat and stared at him writhing in pain, that smile still plastered across his face. “Marcus, come on!”

“Yes, run little travelers,” the thing spat, craning his neck up to face us, blood flecked across his pale flesh. “Better get out fast before the rest of us get here. They’re gonna want to kill you!”

Sadie grabbed my wrist and yanked my body toward her, dragging me out of my daze. We hurried across the store, leaping over the spilled blood as we made for the back office toward the exit. The thing’s squeals reverberated off the walls as he sang out his battle cry, the chant ringing in my ears as we dashed outside into the night.

They’re gonna kill you…

They’re gonna kill you…

They’re gonna kill you!

About the Author

I first started writing this piece during the COVID-19 pandemic. Originally, it was a silly little fanfiction to keep me entertained during lockdown, but over the years it has evolved into its own story that explores what defines us as people. I started to navigate how these characters react to crisis and how far they are willing to push their limits for the sake of survival. This is the first chapter of a novel that focuses on these themes as relationships are formed and tested in the midst of the apocalypse and as the need to survive begins to outweigh morality and truth. 

This is now my seventh time rewriting just this chapter. What once was fanfiction is now completely untethered from its source material and has grown from a typical zombie narrative to a deep-dive into humanity's response to catastrophe. I hope you enjoy.

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Cover design made using Canva design tools.