"Stupid bastard. Stupid, fucking bastard." He drew one foot back as if to kick Davin's body but stopped, rubbing a sleeve across his face. "We gotta get him outta here," he said, almost choking on the words.

I looked back at the corpse. His face was ruined, but in my mind's eye I saw Davin as he was alive. I saw his cockeyed smile and confident flicker in his eye. I knew what would happen if we carried him back to the compound.

"We can't take him back."

"What?"

I thought of Mom; the last time I saw her they doused her with fuel, dropped their torches, and her skin cracked and blackened, sending an angry plume of black snaking into the sky. Maybe the booze did it, worked on my stomach and my brain, but I knew we couldn't bury him out here---the zombies would make a meal of his remains before the day was out. We couldn't take him back with us either. "I'm not letting those paranoid bastards make a little bonfire of his body. He didn't want that."

"Are you nuts?" Dan slumped into a pew. "Those rot-bags will chew him up if we don't." Silence filled the little church before he spoke again. "What the hell do you want to do, stuff him in one of those damn grease barrels?"

I reached for Davin's gun. The stock was battered now, blotted with dried blood and mud, but I could make out the groove Davin had carved with his knife. I counted thirteen older marks from his father and grandfather. Five more tallies for the dead at our feet would make nineteen. That gun had been his grandfather's, passed down for generations.

"No, we send him out right."

~

Dan helped me drag a few pews into a pile, and then I turned over a little table at the center of our kindling. Dan was stronger than me, so he hoisted Davin's body over his shoulders, lugged him to the front of the church, and laid him out on the table. I pried open our remaining jar of booze and doused his body with it. It tasted like shit, so I knew it was strong enough to burn well. Poking my hand in my jeans, I fished around for the lighter, Dad's old thing with the initials engraved on the side.

I snapped the lighter open against my leg. With a quick flick of my thumb a small flame lurched toward the dark ceiling of the church, and I touched the fire to the edge of the table, watching it explode as a magnificent pyre fit for our friend. We stood outside the building for a while, chased back by the heat. I wanted to wait until every beam in the church blackened, devoured by the orange fire, and collapsed on itself. Dan and I were silent. The world was silent. As the fire melted into an ash pile we turned and stumbled down the hill. On our way back to the wall I glanced off into the sunrise. We spotted a zombie, a lanky thing stumbling away from us down a quiet street---he hadn't come with the others, and how many more shambled about in the darkness I would never know. It faced the other way and didn't see us. Dan raised his gun but hesitated. "Aw hell," he muttered as he dropped the gun.

Behind the zombie, the eastern sky started to balloon with pinks and oranges, and I took it in, trying to memorize the look of the morning sun cresting a hill. You couldn't see a sunrise like that in the compound. I realized that the rest of my life would be spent behind the wall, and understood why Davin had charged headlong into the arms of the dead. At that moment, I feared the stifling closeness inside more than the few pathetic, undead bastards that littered fly-over country.

The Beach

TIM LEBBON

"Sunday," Ray said.

I nodded. "Sunday. Day of rest." From behind us, the regular crack of rifles.

He sighed. "I'm dead beat. Stiff as a bugger. Do you think there's any hope?"

Without looking at him, I uttered something between a giggle and a sob. I'd been feeling pretty weird lately. "There's always hope. So long as we have bullets, there's always hope." I drew a shape in the dew-speckled grass, but did not know what it was meant to be.

"Cliché King strikes again."

We faced the house because it implied normality, a façade from the past. It stood alone on the plain, a supposed retreat from all that was happening. We had come here because we thought it would be safe. We thought nobody else would know about it. Our complacency had marked us out.

Behind us, another cascade of rifle shots. Ammunition was running low. The snipers were using their rounds sparingly, trying to line up two or more to make the most of the shot. Each miss was another two steps closer to the end; each hit was merely one.

"I never thought it would end like this," Ray said. "When we came here, I mean. I thought it would be safe. We can see for miles around. I thought it'd be safe." He often used the word safe,as if repetition could imbue it with power over unrelenting reality.

I glanced at my watch, but did not know the time. The smashed face recorded forever the instant of my fleeing the city, where I had abandoned Gemma to her fate. She had been dead already, but I could have done so much more for her. I hated myself for that. I hoped she did not hate me too.

Sometimes I thought I saw her on the distant hillside, shuffling towards the house with interminable, relentless steps. I prayed every night that it would not be my shift when she arrived.

"Our shift," I said. Ray and I stood, turned from the house----the mental placebo for our sickness----and faced the real world.

I took a rifle from Dawn. I smiled encouragingly, but she had been at the barricade for two hours, and her face was molded grim.

The gun was still hot. The rack of magazines was sadly depleted. I'd have to make every shot count.

There must have been a million of them. They seemed to be coming here from all over the world. Dead but walking, all their stagnant attention was focused on our house. We were the centre of the world, and it was hopeless. I wished they would all turn around and walk back the way they had come, but eventually, I knew, they would simply travel around the globe and reach us from the opposite direction.

I took aim and fired. A head exploded into dry brains and shattered skull.

We were an island in a sea of moving dead. They walked over the pathetic corpses of those we had already shot. They came slowly, like a glacier of doom, guaranteed to sweep us away eventually but content in the knowledge that they need not rush things.

I took aim and fired. One went down with half a head, the bullet ricocheting and punching through the spine of another. A bullet well spent.

In the distance, flaming red hair. A smile borne of decomposition, not love. Gemma.

It would be another hour or so before she was near enough to be worth shooting. It was an hour I spent reliving our time together, like an extended flashback experienced by a drowning man. And I was drowning. Choking on the inevitability of things. Putting off the end, as mankind had for decades, the difference being that I had no faith in redemption. I was not waiting for God to intervene; I simply wanted a few more hours of life.

At the end of the hour, when she was close enough for me to see the empty sockets where once resided the eyes I loved, I took aim and pulled the trigger. But there were no more bullets left.

Fast Eddie's Big Night Out

JOHN L. FRENCH