He revved the truck’s engine, yet from beyond the chips in the windshield the herd remained, blocking the road. Leaning, lurching and then shuffling back into place, but never clearing the asphalt. “Git!” He speed rolled the window back up, wrist aching. Rivulets of Maker’s pooled and dribbled down his dimples and down his chin, clung to his three hairs of goatee. Breaking into COLONIST’S Liquor, originally considering his go-to well to drink from, he’d asked himself, “Well, why spare myself from the good stuff in the zombie apocalypse?” For the last man alive, Wild Turkey was only good for violence.

He lit a cigarette. Smoke quickly stung his eyes, but not so much that he couldn’t tuck the brown paper napkins in the bottle’s mouth, flip it over, and then: flame. Droplets of liquor ignited too, and the juggling act he did with the bottle at least put it out the window. He hit the gas. Flames crawled to the window and him driving cranking it shut despite the familiar little oaken whiff which he lingered on, remembering a fine night with the turk and Halo’s choir when he clipped the outside of the herd, just a head bouncing off a dull sideview mirror and skidded on for ten, twenty, thirty feet before entering into the crushing embrace of an old oak, awaiting along the road.

He’d expected to stumble out with a riot of them around him. Rotting lips inches from his flesh and only the holy distance of his double barrel between them. Yet they had only turned in place and whatever degree they had advanced was so minimal that the buckshot barely swayed them.

Even as he broke the barrels and stock, pulled and tossed the steaming shells, stomach feeling the breeze as his shirt flagged back. Even taking a knee behind the little Stonehenge herb garden, ready to defend his neighbor’s yard. The crowd had only inched closer.

 Panting, he raced home, to the ranch style at the dead end of the street. Jingling keys and missing lock as fear kept him out. Now they moved in shuffling lockstep, spread across the street and into yards, trailing worthless limbs and entrails. From the inside, the merciful deadbolt slid into place with all the weight of heaven.

Theo’s parents had decorated the house over the course of their lives in a maximalist style, wherein photos adorned every inch of available space, in a panoply of frames surrounding images of toothy smiles in front of the Grand Canyon, emerging from blue playground tunnels, in so many configurations he struggled to remember them all. It did, as he grew up, come to make him laugh that mom was so insistent on her children being ridiculous cheesers for photographs. Her lips often pursed in anger as if sewn shut and her eyes widened as though pried open. That face was his most coherent memory of her.

That and the last face. Laid as if sleeping, but not. Skin yellowed and almost unhuman, hair thinned to a few delicate strands she would have hated to have seen. The funeral director waited with hands folded for confirmation before condemning her to the oven. Her ashes sit now in what was once the niche for a corded phone.

Alcohol does not dim the dreams. Her hands slipping through his, her nightie rippling with solar winds as she flits into starry, impossible distance. He loses her again and again.

“But you don’t have to.”

The voice, barely even a whisper, breath slipped under the rotted weatherstripping around the door. He almost believed it too came from the dream. But in the drunken haze he awakened into, drool stuck in mouth corners, he hears again hateful words.

“We love you, please don’t do this to yourself.”

The drywall dust billowed out of the hole even with his hand still submerged. He had to go to the kitchen sink, wash off the gypsum, reveal the fresh scoured ravines of his knuckles. But when he looked up to see the pair of them, lightly swaying, arms open as if awaiting embrace, that he fell to fetally clutch himself on the hairy and coffee grounded tile.

“I am a man!” He screamed. And to each door and window, where stood a waiting corpse, he repeated the scream, circumambulating, tearing his clothing so that buttons ricocheted, stopping to scream slurs at one without even really looking at. Panting, still elevated, hopeless, he saw his way out.

It had been leaning beside the door jamb, ever since he had sequestered himself inside. As he fell into staring, the invaders begin knocking, at first gently, but then harsher and harsher as he grabbed the long barrels in his hand. The door hammered, hinges loosening as he retreated to the walk-in closet in the furthest depths of the house. Logistically, he’d been struggling with the dynamics of sucking on the barrel and pulling the trigger when they burst in on him.

He expected to be dragged out, and he was, but only to be pulled to the center of their group, separated from his final rebellion. He looked into her face, pelleted acne delicately shining in one cheek. “We cremated you.”

And she is all open arms, and he cannot but fall into them, fall on his back exhausted, fall into the waiting embrace of the many hands as they clench tight around him.

The difference he rose into he recognized as clarity. The herd dissipated, shambling off to other purposes until just he and her stood there. Then she was off to the living room, found the old sudoku she’d been scratching at before dying and settled into the couch.

He felt both hate and love for that concentrated face, but neither ruled him. “Will Dad and Veronica come?”

She shrugged, “When they’re ready.”