“Hello, my name is Billy, and I am alive,” I say, as I do every week at these stupid-ass meetings.

“Hi, Billy,” the soft, sad voices of the eight other victims on stage with me echo through the mostly empty auditorium.  When the defeated speak in unison, the sound has no power to uplift.  In fact, it’s almost like a moan from my past.  I shiver as the soft breeze of a lost memory drifts just out of reach.

I’m pretty sure Dr. Yvonne, sitting on the poorly lit stage with the nine of us, knows I don’t believe the affirmation.  She has no firsthand knowledge of what we’ve gone through, are going through, or will go through.  She only knows what she’s observed, read, and studied.  She is not one of us, and I don’t care about her opinion.  But Old Joe, fiddling with his eye patch across from me, Nancy, sniffling her nose to my right, and the other pallid faces in our ‘Circle of Belonging,’ look up to me, so I keep up the façade, even if their faith is misplaced.

“I was never dead.  I am glad to be alive.  I understand the disease controlled my body and my mind.  The disease is gone now.  I am well.  I am whole.”  I try to ignore the way my voice bounces off the lonely walls.  I try to ignore the vacant seats of the auditorium that were once filled with hundreds of eager teenagers, chomping at the bit to live life to its fullest, to ignore danger, to spread their proverbial wings and fly into life like laser guided missiles of being. I try to ignore all the signs of death.  Yes, Profine and the CDC/APA have done a great job of turning this abandoned high school and adjoining neighborhood into a safe haven for those of us ‘lucky’ enough to have been ‘cured.’  But what 10 years ago was a thriving, Midwestern, suburban symbol of middle-class America in the first decade of the 21st century, has now turned into a secure ghetto for the formerly ‘undead.’  This eerily quiet treatment facility is just another sign that things are not the way they should be.  At this thought, I shiver again.

Dr. Yvonne notices.  “Billy, are you alright?” she asks.  I can tell in her voice there is a mixture of fear underlying her sympathy.  This worries me, since Dr. Yvonne should be confident that I am, in fact, all right.  She is, after all, one of the progenitors of Tetdat, the single shot vaccine that effectively wiped the virus from my blood and brain, waking me to this perpetually cold life I now live.

I nod and sit; the rigid surface of the folding chair sends chills through me.  I’m trying hard not to look at Dr. Yvonne’s bulbous body and poofy red hair as she leans forward, concern spreading across her jowly face.

“I’m just cold,” I say.  “You know how it is for us.”  I smile weakly and wrap my arms around my chest, rubbing my shoulders as if to emphasize the fact that my blood doesn’t flow exactly as it should.  “This place is . . . drafty.”

Dr. Yvonne chews on the tip of her pen and studies me.  Her fat lips wrap around it greedily and for a moment all I can do is thank God I’m not that pen, which is the most I’ve thanked God for in years.  After an interminable long silence, punctuated only by Nancy’s soft whimpers, and the almost inaudible chewing sounds from Dr. Yvonne’s mouth, she finally, deliberately, removes the pen and says, “Yes, I am sorry about the location of our meeting this week.  You know how it is though.  With the vaccination crews finally getting into the more remote parts of the world, our little Omaha Outpost is filling up fast.”

I can see in the way her eyes search and her porcine head bobs back and forth, that she is hoping for some positive response to this news.

We give none, perhaps because I give none.

“This doesn’t interest you?” she asks, almost hurt.  “Our little facility here in Nebraska is Profine’s center for the cure!  You have no questions about all of our new patients?  You don’t wonder why there are no crowds looking for lost loved ones at the fence?”  She leans back, exasperated.  “No one’s curious?”

“These meetings aren’t for discussing the daily functions of your ‘little facility,’ Dr. Yvonne, we’re not Profine,” I say.  “We’re not even the government.”  I must keep a strange balance now that I’m the veteran in the group.  Before Gerald up and left a few months ago, without so much as a goodbye—Goddamn him—he told me that these meetings, as mundane, as ineffectual as they seem, serve a purpose in that they bring like-people together.  They may be miserable experiences proctored by bubbly doctors still giddy on their discoveries, newfound fame, and Nobel Prizes.  They may be two hour-long lies.  They may suck.  But they are needed.  So I steer us in the right direction, away from Dr. Yvonne’s stories to . . . well . . . to anything else.

“You’re right,” the good doctor concedes.  “I just get so excited about all this.”  She waves her arms around and since the cold doesn’t bother her like it does the rest of us, I am gifted with a front row ticket to the greatest underarm fat show on earth.  It swings, it flops, it slops around.

And again, I shiver.

“Are you sure everything is alright, Billy?” Dr. Yvonne asks.

Right now, the funny part is my shivers, those things scaring the good doctor, make me feel more alive than any of the words, meetings, group sessions, exercises, or drugs that fat bitch offers us every week.  Feeling a sensation, any sensation, zipping through my body, popping from the base of my spine up to my brain stem and sending small tidal waves of shock to all of my appendages . . . this is the definition of living.  This is what I want to feel—the polar opposite of numb.  This is what I want to share with Old Joe, Nancy, and everyone.  The important thing is to feel after the numbness that infected us.

Everything else is secondary.

Before I can say this, Dr. Yvonne claps her meaty hands and grins at the group, the sound resounding throughout the auditorium.  “Alright, very good, everyone . . . ” she talks on now, focusing on lists of daily affirmation activities, everyone else’s current stability, and a few other remotely pertinent topics, but I zone her out, watching all her fat float around as she moves.  I’m astounded every time I realize she survived the outbreak and I didn’t.  I mean, how could she have moved quickly enough to get away from the infected?  She looks like a blimp dressed up as Katy Perry, all skintight purple short skirts and shirts with no sleeves, ever.  Puts a whole new twist on that song, “Teenage Dream” doesn’t it?  I remember listening to it with my wife the day the infected started walking around and . . . eating everything.  It’s hard to believe that was only 10 years ago.  I liked that song until I met Dr. Yvonne.

Since I’m lost in thought and no one else is talking, Dr. Yvonne rambles for another 15 minutes, managing, despite my initial protests, to get a few words in about the new patients as well as the ‘magnificent’ strides the doctors are making in medication for our side effects, the ‘hopeful breakthroughs.’  “There is a new supplement we’re developing,” she prattles, probably seeing another award and research grant she can fritter away on bad clothes, “it takes the blood out of the eyes, or at least lessens it, and—”

“What about our skin?” Nancy interrupts with a variation on the same question she asks every week.  Her voice has a slight tremor and she stares at the hardwood stage floor as she speaks, her wavy brunette hair quivering and her large dark eyes watering up.  “My husband won’t even sleep in the same room with me.  He says I’m . . . he says I’m . . . a monster.”

She’s lying.  It’s worse than that.

“Now Nancy,” Dr. Yvonne takes on her best grandmotherly tone, flashes her pearly whites, stands, and walks across the stage, each of her giant feet’s high heels clicking and clacking as they land on the hardwood.  I wonder where she found a pair of high heels big enough to fit her as she takes Nancy’s hand in both of hers, stroking her knuckles.

It’s almost sensual.  Or it would be, if Nancy wasn’t shaking, if eerie, pink, salty trails weren’t streaking through the heavily caked makeup on her sharp, pale cheeks, if her whimpers weren’t becoming louder and louder, and if we didn’t know where this was going.

“You know you will be the first people I tell about any new meds to get the natural color back to your skin.”

The way she says ‘natural’ makes me want to kill her.  And there may be a part of me that still wants to eat her.  She would make an ample meal for someone suffering from the disease I once had.

The way Dr. Yvonne talks must not bother Nancy though, because she nods solemnly.  I watch as tears fall to the stage and splash, leaving a small, pink puddle.

Dr. Yvonne doesn’t have to say anything else.  She should kneel, scoot her ample frame in closer to Nancy, and hold the poor woman who reminds me of a China doll—very pretty but one of the most breakable things in the world.  But Dr. Yvonne doesn’t like to focus on just one of the group when we meet as a whole.  When she speaks, she speaks for everyone.  So she must continue.  “However, there are several cosmetic surgeons who’ve had luck treating the formerly infected’s skin, and as I said earlier, as we speak, our doctors are working on the supplement to remove blood from the eyes.  Why Gerald . . .” she pauses here, looks around the room and nods slowly.  “You all remember Gerald, right?”

We collectively agree that we do, in fact, remember Gerald, and I’m suddenly interested.

“Well, I was going to save this for later,” she begins, fully turning attention away from Nancy and her growing sobs.  “But this has already been a rough meeting, so I will share it early.”  One of her fat hands digs into a pocket on her purple skirt, and I am amazed that she doesn’t get it wedged there.

Before I have time to contemplate what she could be digging for in that tight, tight pocket, she pulls a handscreen forth and smiles.  She bends, placing it on the small coffee table in the middle of our circle of uncomfortable chairs, and I am ‘lucky’ enough to be looking right at her heaving, gigantic cleavage.  It’s an accident on both our parts.  But when I see her eyes twinkling with pleasure, like two pieces of fool’s gold lodged in pockmarked cookie dough, I know she thinks I looked on purpose, and I am afraid.  Which, as far as I’m concerned, is actually a good thing.

Fear means I’m alive.

After scaring me, Dr. Yvonne trundles back to her seat, and claps again, causing the handscreen to shoot out an image of Gerald hovering over the table for all of us to see in glorious holographic 3-D.  He smiles.  He waves.  His shaved head gleams in the sun wherever this was filmed.  His eyes are still horribly bloodshot and pinkish, like all of ours–except Dr. Yvonne’s of course—but there is brilliance to his skin that makes me want to cry.  It’s dark, dark like in those pictures he used to bring to meetings from before he was infected.  And he looks happy.  For a moment, I forget my bitter rage at Apple and Microsoft and all those companies who locked several of their scientists and engineers away for the duration of the outbreak, building new machines like this ubiquitous handscreen—the Post Infection War’s ‘greatest handheld media device.’

“Hi guys!” Gerald says.  His voice sounds like that of an old sitcom actor, the generic one every sitcom had, the one whose only purpose was to get laughs.  “I’m me again!” he claims with such eager jubilation that I have trouble believing him.  He isn’t the Gerald I know.

The Gerald I know is a brooding, grey skinned, lonely, angry man.  He was once arrested for beating up a gang of twelve “Z-bashers” as the media so affectionately dubbed those assholes who no longer hate homosexuals, but have to hate someone.  So they hate us.  Wait.  That’s not fair to them.  I’m pretty sure they still hate homosexuals still too.  The Gerald I know though, he hates everyone indiscriminately.  He is a man who prefers the darkness to the light, because at night it is far more difficult to tell his skin is about five shades too pale.  He is a man I got drunk with more times than I can count.  He is a man who cried to me about the nightmares where he ate his children—nightmares that have a distinct basis in reality, nightmares that make me happy most of us remember next to nothing about our time . . . infected.

As ‘Gerald’ tells us in this prerecorded message about how Dr. Yvonne secretly sent him to see some cosmetic surgery specialist down in Corpus Christi, Texas of all places, I’m suddenly, uncontrollably angry.  All I can think to say is, “This is a lie.”

There is a collective gasp amongst the members of the group, even Nancy, who usually releases gasps only in relation to her sobs.  Dr. Yvonne snaps her fingers and the handscreen pauses, leaving the image of Gerald, happy, healthy, and probably receiving a blowjob as he speaks, there to mock us.

“I’m sorry, Billy, do you have something to say?”

I get up and shake my head.  “I need a cigarette.”  Before anyone can object, I have my coat on, its heavy leather wrapping around me like a warming force field, and I’m making my way across the stage, down the stairs, and toward the exit.  My size 11 Chucks make a sound so dissimilar to the sound of Dr. Yvonne’s high heels, that we couldn’t possibly be the same type of animal.  Before I disappear through the exit though, I say my piece.  “And I can’t take this bullshit anymore.”

Then I’m gone.

I know Gerald—the old one—wouldn’t be happy with me.  And honestly, I’m not either.  I don’t know why seeing him like that got me to speak the way I did.  But I’m not going to question it.  It might be the first time one of us has stomped out of a meeting, but at least that’s better then what Gerald did—running away to be experimented on at the behest of this place, these people.  Who’s to say I can even believe Dr. Yvonne and her handscreen?  Shit, that whole thing could be faked and Gerald could be dead for all I know.  Maybe seeing me leave like that will be good for everyone else.  Maybe they will see that you don’t always have to stay in a group, that you don’t always have to be afraid, or be a lapdog to the Profine scientists, or the CDC scientists, or the APA doctors, or the fucking feds who probably created this Goddamn infection in the first place.

I light a cigarette and mutter, “Fuck,” as I let the harsh smoke walk through my lungs.  It’s a cool night and I need anything that will make me feel warm.  The scenery just won’t do it in our ghetto.  All the houses with their meticulously manicured lawns, the garbage-free streets, and the identical smartcars in every driveway . . . .  It’s all so bland, and I decide to throw caution to the wind, pull the passcard from the lanyard on my neck, and swipe my way into the real world.

It isn’t that I don’t appreciate what the doctors here did for me, for all of us.  I’m glad I’m not stumbling along in a death-like state, searching for nothing but fresh meat anymore.  I’m glad they gave me the vaccine soon enough after I was infected so that I didn’t just die when the disease did.  I’m glad for so many things.  But I’m also pissed.  It seems like everywhere I look, all I see are the worst of mankind, thriving in the insanity that started with the Infection War and continued with this new world order we have, whatever it is.  Meanwhile, the rest of us silently suffer, disappear, or are given this new half-life of constant shivering and fear.  Of course, I’m glad I’m not a monster anymore, but on the other hand, what is left of mankind is pretty monstrous itself.

Sometimes I wish I was more like my wife and would’ve had the guts to eat a bullet the day I was bitten.  Medicine hasn’t found a cure for that one yet.

I’m lost in my thoughts and walking, with no particular direction, about a block from the ghetto where we are all sequestered, when I hear running footsteps.  I wonder why footsteps seem to be the first things I notice since I was cured, then I hear Nancy’s familiar sobs.

I turn swiftly, defiantly, and for the third time tonight I feel alive.

Nancy stops.  Her tears have made a mess of her face, her makeup.  I can see the grey tones of her skin clearly, circled by splotches of pink and brown makeup.  It makes her look more horrible than she did before.  It tells me she’s a liar.  But I can’t help but have a soft spot for her, especially since her man is treating her the way he is.  I know what she is going to say before she opens her mouth, so I try to stop her.

“I’m alright,” I say.  “You shouldn’t have followed me.”

“But Billy, I know seeing Gerald must have been—”

I toss my cigarette to the ground.  “Don’t say anything about it.  I don’t want to talk.  Go back.  It’s dangerous out here for you.”

Nancy sniffs and looks around at the nondescript neighborhood we’ve found ourselves in.  The gated ghetto the government established for us is a few blocks away and Nancy hadn’t followed me, I wouldn’t be worried.  It’s not that I’m suffering from some kind of misguided sense of machismo.  I just don’t fucking care.

“It’s dangerous for you too,” Nancy says.  “Why’d you come out here?”  She studies the growing darkness.

I shrug.  “Had to.”

She takes a cautionary step toward me, saying, “I wasn’t entirely truthful in there, Billy.”

“I know,” I try hard to effect disinterest.

“Why didn’t you call me on it?” she asks.  She’s holding her hands together now, still glancing at the shadows.

I shrug again.  “In the meetings?  With Dr. Y?”

She nods.

“I can’t do that, Nancy.  I can’t turn her loose on you.  Your husband’s gone, isn’t he?”

“Yes,” she says, “and he took my daughters.”

I blow smoke in the air and watch until I can’t see it anymore.  “I thought it was bad with him, Nancy.  I mean I heard you guys fighting the other night . . . but . . . .  I’m sorry.”

A smile creeps across her lips nervously, as though they’re not used to the sensation.  She takes another step forward and finally looks at me, saying, “Thank you.”  Centered in two pools of pinkish blood I see what are actually a pair of deep dark eyes that I know, once upon a time, mesmerized more than one man.  “That’s the nicest thing anyone has said to me in a lon—”

“Hey!” an angry, high-pitched voice silences Nancy.  “Who are you?”

I turn to see a skinny little man amble toward us with the grace of a drunk on a five-day bender.  His arms bat back and forth as though he is trying to keep his balance.  The way his legs bend, so wide, it seems unnatural, causes me to take a step back.  He approaches without caution, only stopping his jerky, monstrous movements when he in uncomfortably close and Nancy’s hands have wrapped around my arms.

He’s wearing black overalls and a glare that screams hate.  “You’re zombies, ain’t you?” he asks.

Nancy stutters a reply that means nothing and slowly moves so that she is behind me.

“No,” I say with as much conviction as I can muster.  “We’re not.”

The man steps closer still, popping our social bubble with an urgency that forces me to step back again.  He’s looking directly into my eyes before I can turn away.

“But you were, weren’t you?” he growls this question, sending liquor stained spittle into my face.  He knows the answer.

I nod.  There’s no use lying.  He’s seen my eyes up close.  He can see the red there, even if he can’t tell how pale my skin is.

“You’re from that government place then?” he asks, pointing a crooked finger back at the ghetto and spitting.  His eyes dart from Nancy to me and back again.  There is an energy around him, a red, hot rage, seething, begging for release.  I’m almost jealous of his heavy breaths and beastly heat.

I nod again and raise my arms up to show my palms, complacent.  Nancy hands grip my shoulders so tight it hurts.  Her sniffles drum in my ears.  If she weren’t here, I would attack him, probably bite him too just for fun.  Then I’d be put in one of those wards with all those people who never quite lost the appetite.  It’d be worth it to see someone else scared.

The man laughs through gritted, jagged teeth.  “Your kind killed my family.  I’ve been waiting for this.”

“For what?” I ask through my own gritted teeth.

In response, the man whistles and the shadows vomit out several other men all wearing the same nondescript black overalls and hate filled eyes.

“What’s going on?”

“We’re doing what the government won’t,” the man says, then attacks me with two surprisingly hard fists.

He’s older, filled with more rage than discipline, so avoiding his blows and smacking him down quickly would be easy enough for a middle-aged man like me.  But as he does this, I realize the reason I crossed over into their world.  I don’t want to stop him.

I want to die.

The others only stand behind, on the shadow’s periphery, grunting occasionally, or laughing, as the old man pummels me.  It’s not long before I’m on my knees, wavering as blood pours from my mouth.  It’s not long before Nancy is screaming and the other men’s laughter increases.  It’s not long before I hear the sick sound of a brick breaking a human’s skin and crunching his skull.

Then there is silence except for the sound of Nancy screaming.

Then the brick hits the ground and bedlam ensues.

I’m on my feet and running, faster than I imagined I would be, ignoring the pain in my face.  Nancy is at my side, we’re holding hands, though I don’t remember reaching for her, and she is babbling about murder, pity, sorrow, forgiveness, and so many things I don’t want to hear as we scurry through the neighborhood like panicked rats.  The Z-bashers aren’t as fast—still flabbergasted by what Nancy did to their leader, I suppose.  I know running isn’t brave, but I’m not a fighter, never was.  Before this all went down, I was an office equipment salesman.  I worked out and kept fit, but the last fight I was in had been when I was in college.

When we stop and catch our breath, I laugh, asking, “What the hell was that?”

“Z-basher,” Nancy says.  Her voice is cold, removed.

“I know,” I reply.  “But what you did . . . .”

“Shut up,” Nancy speaks with authority, and I listen.  She wraps her arms around me and leans in close, closer than I ever expected Nancy to be to me, and she whispers, “My house isn’t far from here.  I’ll take you there and fix up your face.”  The next thing I know, she’s kissing me and I taste tongue and passion and sex before I wince at the pain it causes in my new lacerations and bruises.

I stare at her, dumbstruck.  “Let’s go to my place,” she says quietly before I can speak.  “We better move quick before they find us.  I think I hurt that guy pretty bad.”

I’m silent, letting Nancy take the lead, as we snake through this neighborhood toward our own.  When we finally get to an entry point, and Nancy slides her card, I can feel an erection growing.

When we’re safely in the gate, Nancy feels it.

And I’ve come before we reach her house.

Nevertheless, once I’m bandaged and can get it up again, the sex is incredible.  It’s this angry, sad, lusty hot mess that hurts not only my new injuries, but my whole body so bad it feels good.

A few hours later, when it’s all over, and I’d been asleep, I wake to a dull thudding of pain in my face and the sound of Nancy’s breaths.  They’re coming in slow, shallow waves, as though she’s been crying.  It’s dark but I know she’s there, sitting on the edge of the bed, naked, her arms wrapped around her legs.

“What’s the matter?” I ask, reaching out to her.

She jerks away and says, “This was a mistake, Billy.  I want you to leave.”

I don’t argue.  It would be fruitless anyway.  Whoever that was that repeatedly dropped a brick on a Z-basher’s head, led me through the neighborhood back to her home, bandaged my face, and ravished me, wasn’t Nancy.  This is Nancy.

This is wrong.

I quietly find my clothes, leave her house, and make my way home, remembering one of my wife’s favorite quotes.  It was Scarlet O’Hara’s mantra—“After all, tomorrow is another day.”