-Prologue-

The team even had to be careful hosing down equipment and property after a particularly fierce engagement. Zombie flesh didn’t tend to stay solidly on the body, especially after death when they’ve had time to dry out. It flakes off like the ash from a cigarette, and a stray burst from a hose could aerosolize the stuff in a heartbeat. You didn’t have to worry about infection from it since the virus couldn’t survive the air, and it wasn’t “direct fluidic contact” like those USAMRIID boys had called it. But the flesh was vile, necrotic, and a breeding ground for all kinds of bacteria. If ingestion or inhalation didn’t kill you in a day or two, the bacterial infection you were guaranteed to make you pray for death before it evaporated away after a few weeks.

Parker had been in that spot once before. Caught up in a battle after a rainstorm, he turned to move back towards cover and wound up taking a mouthful of mud and water. It was lucky he didn’t swallow any of it, or he might as well have taken his own life then. Just a quick mouthful which he immediately spat out, but all the foot traffic from Zack had sloughed off enough of their cells to put him out of commission for three weeks.

They had to hold him down when the infection materialized: hallucinations, dangerously high fever, and continuous pain throughout every fiber of the body. Parker swallowed half the antibiotics in the house before they realized that they were ineffective. You could only let it run its course and do what you could for comfort. The group pumped enough morphine into his veins to kill three grown men, but Parker kept screaming right through it all, long after his heart and lungs should have seized. The sickness kept his body working, fighting, and in unimaginable agony.

The worst was the second to last day of his infection. The other four men were playing cards in the main bedroom. Smoldering cigarettes lay in a crude ashtray in the center of the table, and bottles of beer long since gone stale were sipped gingerly, marked each time by a grimace due to the bitterly sour fluid within. It was a tradition they had carried on in their original lives. It was an attempt to inject normalcy in a world gone to hell. The game was interrupted by cries from the other room. Shuffling out of their chairs and darting across the hall, the men threw the door open to find an almost emaciated Parker with the barrel of his .357 Desert Eagle in his mouth, a finger dangling precariously over the trigger.

Slowly advancing to the far end of the room, the men talked as soothingly as they knew how, while two of the four inched ever closer to their desperate patient and comrade. It was over in seconds. The men exploded off their feet, tackling Parker and fighting viciously to control his hands. The gun was knocked free, and skittered to a harmless stop on the cherry-stained wooden floor. Parker spent the remainder of his infection restrained.

After it was all over, the guys sat on the rooftop with their newly recovered partner as he explained to them his recent breakdown.

“I was so close to snapping, fellas.” Parker tried to relax his hand but couldn’t stop the tremors. His cigarette glared hazily in the early morning fog as he drew a labored puff and exhaled with a hacking cough. “Six straight days awake, and those painkillers just took the slightest edge off. I needed a way out, so I crawled over to the closet and grabbed my pistol. I thumbed the safety and bit down on the barrel, and started to pull the trigger. I just kept pulling and pulling, focusing all my strength on that one task. But it never gave. I just didn’t have the strength to pull the fucking thing. The same thing that damn near killed me is exactly what kept me from doing it myself!”

On that note Parker let out a tortured but relieved cackle, nearly coughing out a lung in the process. For the rest of the week, Parker just kept remarking on how lucky he had been to survive. They all just shrugged it off and laughed together, thinking but never voicing the same sentiment…

“Lucky… That’s one hell of a choice of words.”

It was true though. The thought of a life spent zombified was the most terrifying thing mankind had come to know. The men could deal with the day-to-day search for food, even the lack of recreation in town (aside from their twisted form of hunting) had led them to find joy in simpler amusements: reading, working out, and reinforcing the battlements whenever they could. Death wasn’t something they wished for these days, not a one of them. Those first six months had been the hardest, watching friends and family disappear from sight one by one, only to return in the coming days as a decaying husk of their former selves, with ruptured throats baying out the tortured moan of an insatiable hunger. It was easy enough to imagine yourself in Parker’s position, your mouth or your chin pressed up against the cold steel of your .45 in the hopes that with one slip of the hand, you might be free from fear. Too many times had they entered apartments, houses, simple shacks only to find the owner dangling from a rafter by crude ropes, with slashed forearms, or the barrel of a 12-gauge fused to their lips. That mentality, for whatever reason, soon wore off of the Survivors. Call it hope, instinctual drive, whatever you like, but the prospect of living even a damned life on Earth was enough to keep the men from taking that last desperate step towards freedom.