Marlena smelled of stale piss and rubbing alcohol. Blotches the color of overripe apples stippled her cheeks, and her eyes were dark troughs in a barn-gray face. Her pale lips had been reduced to thin slashes of peeling flesh and the weak breath passing between them smelled of approaching death.

Richard sat in a chair by Marlena’s bedside, listening to her labored breathing and watching fluids percolate from the tubes snaking from beneath her blankets.

It was an awful thing to see her body wither away. She was becoming unsaturated with life from the inside out as the cancer cells coursed through her blood.

Marlena’s breath, thick and phlegmy, rattled in her chest. Richard leaned closer, tenderly rubbing her hand and trying his hardest not to weep, silently praying this wasn’t the onset of another coughing fit. The last one had been so violent that even after sitting her up and clapping her back to loosen her lungs, Richard thought the coughing itself would take his wife right then and there.

But then she had hawked up something slick and gelatinous the size of a small strawberry, and the coughing subsided, letting Marlena drift back to sleep.

They were gathering at the front door again.

Richard could hear their dull thumps and persistent scratches and those liquid smacking sounds from their hungry, yawning mouths.

He knew he should check the peephole in the curtain, but right now he didn’t want to see if they’d made any progress getting inside. Seeing them during the day was bad enough. Watching them scramble over each other in the blue haze of night was something he didn’t think he could handle.

He glanced at the nightstand. Styrofoam cups lined up like sentries, dried brown teardrops at their edges and stinking of days old instant coffee. A pile of torn IV tags were there too; Marlena’s liquid diet. There were only three IV bags left to keep her hydrated and nourished. After they were gone, Richard knew what would happen, but like the creatures outside, that was another reality he didn’t want to face.

From downstairs came the sound of heavy metallic thundering and Richard quickly stepped to the window, watching one of them ram its head against the garage door.

The corpse’s back was split open, bloody knobs of a spine and the long gleaming fingers of a rib cage exposed to the night air. It pulled away from the vicious smear on the door and swiveled its head to look up at Richard. It opened its mouth, the flesh of its cheeks ripping and its lower jaw falling down in a gush of black liquid.

In the moonlight, its eyes were wet shadows, but Richard knew its gaze was upon him. It released a gravelly moan and Richard turned away from the window. He glanced at the nightstand to make sure his pistol was still there.

Marlena’s eyelids flickered open like startled moths, and the edges of her lips curled up slightly; as close to a smile as she could muster. The gaze of her beautiful green eyes found him and he knew she was fighting to keep focused, but the effort was too much and her eyes gently shut again.

Richard reached over to wipe her forehead with a damp washcloth. He softly kissed her temple and brushed loose strands of hair away from her face. Two months ago it had been beautiful, the color of spring corn silk, now it was bleached of color, sandblasted and brittle.

He studied the lines in her face as he had done countless times before, and inside his head Richard screamed raw thoughts at what had happened to her; what could have been helped had the end of the world not been taking place outside his plywood covered windows.

Everything changed when Plague 7 hit California. It had taken less than two months before the world had become hell.

All because one woman, a girl, really — she wasn’t even old enough to drink in the States — had bombed a Chinese government lab in protest.

There was no way she could have known the contents of the building and what it housed. Plague-7, what the Chinese bio-technicians called the Crimson Dragon.

Nuclear reactors drew a lot of satellite attention; too difficult to hide beneath the global eye of the United States, so the Chinese had secretly turned to bio-warfare.

Before things got really bad, a Chinese official had released as much as he could to the news stations.

Plague-7 was a radically different approach, relying on combining DNA splices from viral strains and fetal tissue. Even after a decade of study, the research team was stumbling in the dark, still only aware of the basics.

Far from destroying the virus, intense heat made it airborne, a fact which the lab technicians discovered too late. It not only survived indefinitely in both fresh and salt water, but rapidly multiplied in both environments, seeking any available host to invade. And once the infected host died, Plague-7 caused them to reanimate and seek other living things as food.

Easing his fingers from hers, Richard gently laid Marlena’s hand down on the bed and stood to stretch. He heard the bones in his back pop and the pill bottle he had stashed in his pants pocket gave a weak rattle. His foot nudged something beneath the bed and he reached down, pulled a chrome bedpan out from hiding.

Marlena’s body was shutting down. A Hospice nurse had set up a catheter the week before the outbreak, and Marlena’s body had stopped producing waste two days ago. Since then, the bedpan had stopped getting used altogether. Richard flicked the catheter tubing, watching the air bubbles scatter in the remaining urine.

Turning the bedpan over, Richard didn’t recognize the reflection staring back at him.

He ran a hand over his face, feeling the crop of frosty whiskers, and realized he didn’t remember when he’d last shaved. Richard thought and couldn’t recall when he’d last eaten something either, but he didn’t have an appetite to bother with anyway.

He was sure they were getting down to the last of what the pantry had to offer, although Marlena had always liked canning and the cellar had plenty of Mason jars filled with tomatoes and green beans.

Didn’t matter anymore. Richard knew they’d go uneaten.

Richard traced the crows feet at his eyes, and the vertical lines bunched between his eyebrows; the telltale marks of a man carrying thoughts heavier than he should have to. His wedding band gleamed in the low light.

This September would have been their twenty-fifth anniversary; their silver. Why hadn’t he been able to manage the years better? Spent more time enjoying each other, or taken more vacations or…

The muscles in Richard’s face crumpled and he felt his emotions threatening to erupt. He sucked in some air, held it, and shook his head, forcing the feelings away. Soon enough, Richard knew he wouldn’t be able to stop them from surfacing.

In the den downstairs, the front drawer of his desk contained two envelopes holding boarding passes and pamphlets for a cruise ship he and Marlena would never be going on. A surprise trip she’d never know about.

Things should be different. It wasn’t fair.

Fury engulfed him and Richard clenched the bedpan, bringing it overhead. He wanted to slam it against the wall and flip over the nightstand with its dismal rainbow of liquid medicine, old coffee, and magazines read ten times over. He wanted to shatter the glass windows and beat his fists bloody against the plywood until the nails screamed from their sockets and he could see the entire sky again; feel the breeze on his face.

But Richard put the bedpan down and sat.

He could feel the ice pick rhythms of a headache coming on and the bottle of pills pressing into his thigh seemed to pulse, promising relief on many levels.

Not yet.

Not. Yet.

It sounded like one of those goddamn Sci-Fi channel mockumentaries they make to hype up a new movie. Zombies? Bullshit. But after a reporter with a live news feed filmed them stumbling through the streets of Beijing, people started to panic everywhere else in the world.

In less than a day, authorities reported outbreaks in a 120 square mile radius. Three days later and the contagion had consumed China and broke free of its borders. By then it was too late.

When a country with a population of over a billion people gets presented with a virus like Plague-7, there’s no mistaking what the results will be. Earth had developed an unchecked cancer, and no treatment existed that would stop its progress.

Once the virus hit North Korea, Kim Chong-il organized the military and tried to dispatch as many of the walking dead as he could. Using his own people for bait, he herded the dead into tanker ships, turned off their beacon signals, and sent them out to sea.

Kim Chong-il will rot in hell for what he’s done.

When a silent tanker came skidding on shore in the Lost Coast of California, no one from Homeland Security even saw it coming.

Some young, next-new-thing Hollywood director had production set up on the coastline making a film when the first attack happened. One of the sound crew was filmed in hi-definition having his liver eaten and chaos erupted as the rest of the set was overrun.

The next evening, Entertainment Tonight ran exclusive footage of Ashton Kutcher getting his throat torn out by an elderly Korean man. A schoolgirl of no more than nine staggered away with what looked like a chunk of kidney and a leaking, ragged section of intestine.

When it reached Seattle, CNN’s remote tower cameras showed a young brunette with half her face melted. She was wearing a bloody Starbucks apron and sat Indian style on the sidewalk, a severed head cradled in her lap. She kept dipping her fingers into a crushed section of the man’s skull, drawing out what looked like pink ambrosia, and sucking it from her fingers.

Marlena made raspy, dry sounds with her mouth, and tried to lick her lips. Richard withdrew the straw from her untouched glass, capped the end with his thumb to trap the water inside. He held the straw over her lips and let some of the water dribble out to moisten them.

He put the straw back and looked into the glass. The microbes were too small to see but Richard tried just the same. Just before the TV signals had stopped, Plague-7 had hit the public water supply, and he knew it flowed through the pipes into his house. But like most everything else, that didn’t really matter anymore either.

Looting, taking place almost everywhere, leapt to riot proportions, leaving people dying in every way, shape and form. Gun sales skyrocketed to where background checks overloaded the system and customers began shooting the clerks and stealing the weapons.

Total breakdown of society had happened in less than a month. The National Guard was called out, quickly followed by the Marines, then every other possible soldier of all branches, but it was too little, too late. The endless supply of the dead kept coming, and coming, and coming.

Richard was sure the core government was still intact, pocketed away beneath some dank mountain somewhere, waiting things out. But he doubted their waiting would ever end. It’s hard to compete with the patience of the dead.

Radio stations went off the air one by one, leaving white noise in their wake. To their credit, CNN was the last TV station to continue broadcasting, but in the third week it showed nothing but a side angle of the news anchor’s desk, bright blue lights on the panels behind it, as if the camera man had overturned his equipment and left. It stayed like that for about a week, and then it was nothing but static.

After that… there was just nothing but the dead.

Richard had gathered medications for Marlena, then resigned himself to boarding up the house to wait for something to happen.

It was a matter of time for a lot of things to happen.

Eventually the electric would kick out. Eventually the infested water would stop flowing into the house. Eventually Marlena would die, awaken again, and hunger as they did outside.

Eventually.

He picked up his pistol held it to his nose, sniffed the gun oil. He looked into the gaping .45 caliber barrel and then to Marlena.

Richard pressed his palms hard into his eyes, trying to staunch the thoughts in his head, making bright flashes dance in his vision, clenching his jaws tightly together.

Richard wished he was a stronger man, capable of putting a bullet in Marlena’s head, and sparing her the aftermath. But he couldn’t.

He pressed the clip release, felt its weight pop into the palm of his hand, and began to push the bullets free with his thumb. Each round hit the hardwood floor, rolling in fat, lazy arcs. The last round fell and Richard watched the dull brass casing roll beneath the bed.

Marlena stopped breathing.

Richard snapped his head up and looked at her face; saw the worn lines smooth out, her muscles relax.

And his world imploded. Richard crumbled into a heap on the floor, holding Marlena’s hand against the side of his face, and curling his other arm around his knees. Rocking himself. Sobbing. Screaming the tears he had held off for so long.

Richard wept for children they’d put off and postponed again until it was so late in life it seemed foolish to entertain the thought. He wept for things they’d never done and dinners he was late for, too many late nights at the office, and not saying I love you more often. He wept because he could have done more when he had the chance, and didn’t.

Richard stayed that way for a while, until the tears subsided. He used his sleeve to wipe his face and settled into his chair again, reaching deep into his pockets and withdrawing the pill bottle.

He had tried to make Marlena happy as best he could for the years they’d been together. That’s what couples were supposed to do; make each other happy. If it was in his power to fulfill a request from her, he did it, no questions asked. Oh, they’d had quarrels like every couple does, sometimes real screaming matches, but after the storms had passed, they always went back to square one, never holding grudges. The true meaning of mates.

Richard looked down at his wedding band, then at Marlena’s. She’d lost weight so rapidly her finger wouldn’t keep her ring on anymore, and she had cried about it, insisted when she was still coherent that Richard wind yarn around the band to thicken it up and make it fit. He remembered her beaming, resurrected smile when he put it snugly back on her finger again.

He always did love to see her smile. Taking her hand, Richard put it to the side of his face, feeling her soft skin beginning to cool already, losing what little warmth it had.

Uncapping the bottle, Richard began to dump the Darvon into his palm, but turned and shook them into his mouth like a child emptying a box of candy. He chewed them; the acidic taste coating his mouth, and forced some beneath his tongue, wanting them to hit his bloodstream as fast as they could.

He tilted the amber bottle again, letting the remaining pills tumble into his mouth, and Richard chewed them all, swallowing them in three gulps.

From downstairs, he could hear the sounds of them battering the front door. Nails squealing from their position in the oak door frame. Splintering wood.

Richard climbed into Marlena’s bed and lay down beside her. His body started to tingle, and Richard smiled, glad the pills were kicking in. Everything was beginning to feel sharper and out of focus at the same time. Closing his eyes, Richard caught the faint scent of Marlena’s hair; the lilac shampoo she liked.  His hands began to flex involuntarily, bunching the quilt in his fists.

There were more noises but they seemed to be coming from farther away. The sound of moist bones grinding in dry sockets. Something wet and leaden fell to the plush carpet.

The tingling grew to an electric buzz and Richard felt it rush through his veins. He tried to move and it felt as if his arms had floated away like balloons from the butter slick fingers of a child.

He could smell the heady, fetid odor of decaying meat, so thick Richard could taste it in his mouth like rancid syrup. He heard the low, whistling tremor of air passing through dead vocal chords.

One last time Richard opened his eyes to look at Marlena, and he saw her staring back at him, the brilliant emerald green of her eyes now murky and lifeless, absent of emotion.

Richard drifted into a comforting black void. Marlena nuzzled his shoulder, moving her mouth against his neck, tonguing the tender flesh and making soft mewling noises. There was a stinging, ripping pressure at his throat, and a warm, pulsing release.

Richard let himself go, knowing Marlena would be pleased.