He glanced at his four year old daughter and saw that she was looking at the mushrooms growing beside the deer trail.

“Don’t eat those mushrooms, they are poisonous and you will die. Do you understand?”

“Yes Daddy “, she said quickly.

She understood dying. There were two types of death. One kind was where you went to sleep like a princess and never woke up and the other kind was where you turned into a zombie. If she ever died, she hoped she would not turn into a zombie; they were scary and smelled really bad.

“Let’s go”, her father said.

The autumn day was chilly and it would be dark in a few hours. They moved slowly along the trail and every once in awhile her father would stop and listen. The crested a small hill and below them they could see a white farm house and an old barn that was leaning to the side. Her father raised his binoculars and looked through them at the farm. She remembered before the zombies came that she would play with her toy binoculars and look at her dad through them. She would say he had a big head and he would laugh and then she would turn them around and tell him that he had a small head. She liked when her dad laughed, but she had not heard him laugh in a long time.

He knelt down next to her and pointed to the far end of the field.

“See those five old trucks and cars over there?”

“Yes”, she whispered.

Her stomach started to tighten up and she started to shake as she realized what he wanted her to do.

He handed her the screwdriver and a small leather bag.

“I will be watching over you from right here. I have a good line of sight and if any of the zombies come I will shoot them. If you hear a gunshot you run as fast as you can back here to me. Do you understand?”

“Yes”, she whispered again.

He turned and hugged her.

“Go now and be quick.”

She started moving down the hill as quickly as she could. She only fell once and when she glanced back she saw that her father was watching the farm and field through the binoculars. Good, she thought he had not seen her fall. She did not want to disappoint him.

She saw the cars and trucks and headed for them. As she came up on the first rusted car she remembered what kind of car it was. It was a bug. The old neighbor across the street from their house had one and he used to wash it all the time with lots of soap bubbles.

She knelt down next to the flat tire and got out her screwdriver. She pried at the little lead wheel weight her father needed so he could melt them and make bullets for his gun. She pried and pried and finally it came loose. She put the weight in the bag and went to the front tire. But it don’t have one so she went to the other side. This tire had one and after a few minutes she got it loose. She went to the rear wheel and there, sitting against the tire was a plastic Barbie doll. It was just like the kind she used to play with, except this one was dirty and was missing an arm. She bent down and put it in her bag. Hopefully her dad would not be mad at her when she showed it to him. Sometimes he got angry when she didn’t pay attention to what she was doing.

A shot rang out.

She froze in fear.

Another shot rang out and she remembered to run to her dad. She started running as fast as she could towards the small hill where he was. But then she saw him fighting with four zombies, swinging his old lever action rifle like a baseball bat. But then he fell and they were upon him.

She stopped running.

She knew right then that her daddy had died. And not the good kind of died. He would turn into a stinky zombie.

She started to cry.

Then she saw the zombies rise up and move towards her. They started to moan.

She didn’t feel like running anymore. But she knew at that instant what she had to do. She ran right towards the zombies and right through them. They reached for her but she was small and quick and they didn’t catch her. She found the deer trail and ran down it as fast as she could. She could hear the zombies moaning behind her but they seemed far away.

She got to the place where the mushrooms were and rested for a second. She took her Barbie out of her bag and hugged her. Then she started picking the mushrooms and eating them as fast as she could. When they were all gone she lay down upon on her back clutching her Barbie and pretended that she was sleeping beauty. Her stomach started to hurt and she could hear the moans of the zombies getting closer. Then her head started to hurt and she couldn’t breathe. The last thing she heard was a moan that seemed to be right next to her.