The day before the dead came, Ani torched every slip of our sheet music and flooded Hart Street in smoke. “Isn’t it beautiful?” she said, reaching out and trailing five elegant fingers through the haze. “My life’s work, literally gone up in smoke.”

Ani was a singer–songwriter, too, and quick on guitar–with a voice like cigarette fire and ripped silk.

It’s a scientific fact that veins run red and handwriting shouldn’t turn you on, but Anita Medina had actual gravitational pull, and I felt strangely hot at the sight of her spiky crossed t’s going up in smoke. “Why didn’t you save it?” I said.

“What, and start another band? Fifth time’s the charm?” She turned away from the burning papers on the sidewalk, ignoring the wide-eyed kids on their bikes across the street. “When I’m rich and famous, I’ll write a book calledCommitment Issues: A Memoir.”

“How’re you going to get rich and famous with commitment issues?”

“Ooh, Em, calling me out on my shit!” She paused halfway down the street, wind threading through her hair, and smiled at me. “I knew I liked you.”

When the city started to die, my parents packed us up for the suburbs. I could’ve lived with the occasional blood-splattered newscast if it meant we didn’t have to go.

I loved the city. I thought it made you a part of something–that it was a part of you, advertisements papering over your skin and exhaustion fumes in your lungs.

On my second day of school in the suburbs, I met Ani, smoking and cussing at a run in her fishnets, perched on the piano in the empty auditorium with a black notebook and a scowl. “You, with the fantastic Doc Martens, yes. How would you like to help me introduce the riotgrrrl genre to this place’s pitifully shitty music scene?”

I played keyboards. She sang, wrote, printed flyers, coerced new members into joining the band, but she was the heart and I, she said, the catalyst. Us against the world, etc.

To say it was love at first sight would have been a huge overstatement. She was overbearing, opinionated, and aggravating as hell.

But when you watch someone sigh over a sheaf of chord changes, at eleven p.m., when their hair has fallen apart and their lashes flutter in half-sleep, when you pass out on their floor to them humming, low, gritty, beautiful, you get something close. To love, that is.

The day I watched my mother die, Ani was there, kissing my cheek and pulling her long fingers through my hair, soft as a blessing. One hand detangled, the other loosened the deathgrip on the gun in my left.

My mother had been beautiful, and we had the same nose, same freckles across it. We sounded the same when we answered the phone. After the divorce I had crawled into her bed almost every night, reaching for her, and we drew constellations out of chips in the ceiling paint.

She opened her eyes; they were yellow like death, and everything seemed to splinter. When she reached for me, I pulled the trigger.

“Stop.”

“Stop what?”

“Touching me like that, Ani.”

“Or what?”

“Or I’m going to tell you everything I feel about you.”

Ani scowls and pulls away. The cold rush of her hands slipping off my stomach feels like first snow. She still smells like crisp paper and raspberry, and I have literally no idea of how she keeps so clean. “Is that bad?” she says.

“Potentially.”

Ani shifts further away, cross-legged on the mattress in the dark house whose walls are plastered in pictures of another family. We are far out enough in farm land that the night air is still and serene. “Hit me.”

I sigh. The thing is, she kissed me for the first time the day Hart Street fell to the dead, and since then I thought maybe love isn’t a garden, just an escape hatch. “Never mind.”

She rolls her eyes. “Great. Now can we go back to touching like that?” And her mouth covers mine like silence.

I find myself states from the town that never felt like home, back in the city that did. “This is stupid. Dangerous,” I say.

Her eyebrows say, and? She steps one boot onto 53^rd Street.

In the movies cities were crowded by swarms of death, corpses piled on street corners and buildings blown to bits. They got the bodies and the buildings right, but the lack of moans seems perpetual, suspended like the broken-down electric wires. The zombie apocalypse is not a time bomb but a ghost town.

The city never died; it went into shock. The offices are empty, filing cabinets tipped over, spilling million-dollar secrets. The cinemas advertise movies that never had a shot at blockbuster fame. The walls are stained with graffiti that had never gotten cleaned. Coma. A vegetative state.

Somehow, I think as Ani dances in the empty street, that is worse.

During the day she goes out in search of remaining dead. She sings when it is quiet and there are no bones shuffling like dried husks in the street, while wielding guns and knives and broken pieces of pipe, twirling them casual as nothing.

“Do you remember any of our lyrics?” I ask her.

She frowns. “Huh. Not really.”

Sometimes when I have first watch and she falls asleep with her head in my lap, I braid her hair and imagine e-mailing her poems, sharing Thin Mints at the movies, writing her a whole album of songs to fall asleep to.

Sometimes when it rains, and congealed blood flows anew to the gutters, she sings me to sleep, so my dreams are woven through a voice I know like my lifelines, and when I wake up I’m not sure they’ve ended.

She is never as beautiful as she is when she kills. If you could call it that. The government refers to it as the infestation, teenagers as zees or zombies, but Ani has a flair for the dramatic and calls them the subversion.

“Of the natural order,” she said, with a flippant, gorgeous smile. “God, that sounds pretentious. Of society. The slum kids were the first to get infected, right, the lower classes and queers who couldn’t even afford that placebo medicine shit. So while the rich ones sit on their asses or take off in private jets, the slum kids become the ones with the power. Hm? The subversion could infect all their rich asses and turn them into drooling, hungry freaks. What, am I boring you? Let’s make out.”

I always call them the dead. Weren’t they? When I shot my mother it wasn’t her, but the hollow sparking of instinct in what had been her brain.

So when she kills, because that’s what it is, she is quick precision and cigarette skin, and I think that even inches away from open jaws and snapped bones, I could die happy if the yellow eyes were hers.