He walked through the door to Joe’s Beverly Bar and Grill just as the delicate morning mist began to dissipate and the waking sun sent curling rays of dust to sift and shift in the gloom of the empty bar. Without breaking his stride Daniel Murphy shrugged off his gray overcoat and hat, set them on the coat rack beside the door, shifted his pistol to his hip, and moved towards the long oak counter.

“Morning, Joe. How’s business?”

The man behind the bar regarded Dan quietly, shuffling around the inside of the confined space with no apparent destination in sight. Dan took a seat at his favorite stool and sighed deeply, clearing the fatigue from his lungs.

“Gettin’ goddamn cold outside, definitely need a good stiff drink to keep the spirits awake,” he motioned towards a lone whiskey bottle and small glass at the far end of the bar. “You mind?”

Joe didn’t seem to. Dan was quickly back on his feet, reaching the end of the counter and pouring himself a glass. The smooth amber rode down his throat in a single stinging swallow.

“ ‘I know the car that hit me, officer. It’s name was Jack Daniels.’ Hah!”

Joe let forth a groan. He loved jokes, and loud noises especially. Dan drained his glass, clenched his teeth, and exhaled long and hard.

Dan pointed to the bottle, biting his lip. “Mind if I grab another?”

Again, Joe was passive and soon enough Dan brought the bottle back down the bar, placing it directly in front of his stool as he poured himself another glass.

“You know, Joe, one day you’re gonna go and get yourself another customer and I’m gonna feel just rotten for drinking all your good whiskey.”

He took a good look around the room—the overturned tables, the empty booths, the broken pinball machine, and the deep darkness that kept to itself in the furthest of its corners.

“Wish I could’ve seen this place in its prime, Joe. I’m sure it was a sight. Maybe I’ll help you fix it up one day. Then again, I’ve been saying that for months.”

He took another sip of his glass and could feel the liquid medicine working its way behind his eyes and into his smile.

“You know, I thought I heard a helicopter today while I was walking over near Louis Street? Made me think, back to the beginning, y’know? Did you know that the government told everyone that the cities would be the safest place to go when everything first happened? That’s all the radio was saying for a solid month, said the Army and National Guard would be here to help any survivors out. Sort out the mess. Put down the trouble for good. Keep us out of harms way. Yeah right….”

The bar door rattled slightly from a strong dust-thick wind outside, sending rusted Coke cans and newspapers to crumple and drift in the silent city streets.

“And what happens, you ask? Leave the safety of my house, drive for hours, and the goddamn city is empty when I get here. Just empty! All I find are broken down cars, burning store fronts and fuckin’ rabid dogs everywhere,” He began to bring his glass to his lips. “And you of course Joe.” And he drained his second glass.

“I mean, I don’t want to blame the Army or anything, don’t get me wrong, I have no idea what happened before I got here, but then again, the military efficiency these days?” He gestured with a thumbs-down. “I mean, it just seems to me like they’d been enlisting everyone and their goddamn mothers up ‘til recently. You know what I’m saying? No screening or nothin’.”

Drink number three poured easy and smooth into his glass, catching the eye of the sun through the broken windows, sending crystal rainbows to dance across the dark walls.

“You know, Joe, I was in the service,” The barman groaned and a sly smile broke across Dan’s stubbled face. “No, no, really! Well, not by choice that is. I had no desire at all to be off fighting a war in some country I’d never  heard of, but no way in hell would I be some sort of coward draft dodger. But anyway, the chips fell where they did.

“V-Et-Nam!” He emphasized each syllable in the air like a conductor in an orchestra pit, the final note resonating in the darkness and calling another smile to his mouth. “Did you know that at one point during the war your survival rate once you were dropped in was less than fifteen minutes? Fifteen minutes! Hell, you lasted a half hour and you were a goddamn veteran!”

Another sip. “I made it out though, didn’t I? Saw a number of good guys go down though…”

Joe’s eyes stared at Dan’s while the veteran spoke—black, unseeing eyes, sunk deep, deep down into the pockets of his head. They gazed on and on, never breaking, vacant.

Dan sat quiet for a moment, the forefinger of his hands tracing the edge of the glass in front of him in slow steady circles. He brightened back up for a moment, a flood of new memories pouring into his mind.

“The war machine was something in itself to behold, regimented and goddamn efficient! Well, my unit at least. We had a real ball-buster for an officer, Lieutenant Hoot, and he just honed us to be as sharp and proficient as his knife.”

Dan rose from off his chair and began to play war right there in the bar, shouldering an imaginary rifle and looking off in the distance as if the back of the barroom was an exotic Vietcong  jungle.

“There’d be days when we’d have Charlie all around us taking up position, trying to ambush us, cut off our retreat, then boom! Boom! We’d drop them like they were flies in a bug zapper. I mean there was just that rush! The adrenaline coursing through your veins, tearing up your senses, throwing ecstasy in your lungs,” he took a cigarette out of his pocket with his gun hand and fed it into his mouth, followed by a match, then the smoke. “It was better than any drug, faster than your best sex.”

He brought a booted foot up to the bar stool and leaned in closer to Joe who in turn attempted to move closer as well.

“We lost men, don’t get me wrong, war is war. But we made the most of our time out there. We barbequed at base camp, played football. We told stories about our wives, our girlfriends, or our womanizing conquests before the war. We’d gather round trashcan fires at night and acted like we were boy scouts out on a wilderness hike earning our badges. Then in the mornings we’d wake up and serve our country. Serve it right.”

He took his foot down and sat back at his stool. His eyes looking far away, reminiscent, and he tapped at the filter of his cigarette with his thumb. “Serve it right…

“Then there came this day, this one day that changed everything for us. Put the war back into perspective. Thirty years ago and I can remember it like it was yesterday,” He looked back at Joe’s eyes. “We got sent out on this recon mission—nothing special, recon was just a part of the weekly regimen, no big deal. We were sent out to scout along this ridge and it seemed like we were walking for hours. I remember thinking that I don’t think we’d ever been out this far. The forest just seemed a little more dangerous, the wildlife just a little more wild, and it was hot, and I mean hot.”

Dan took a drag from his cigarette, breathing deep of the nicotine, the cherry tip glowing bright orange. As he spoke, the grey smoke drifted out his nose slowly, like his insides were on fire.

“All a sudden we come up on this clearing and old Hoot orders a halt. We stop, and just kind of stare off in the distance, figurin’ out what we see. Pretty soon we can make out this big white washed building a-ways off past the clearing. It’s a little hard to see, but clearly it’s a building of some sort. So on jumps Hoot to the radio, trying to hail command when all of a sudden we hear a screeching sound like thunder, and one of our planes is flying directly over us. Suddenly it’s raining fire, the most vivid and brilliant flames I’ve ever seen just pouring out of the sky just past the clearing.

“We all drop to our bellies, hoping that the jet doesn’t do a second run cause we’re almost positive he doesn’t even know we’re there. And—because, we’re scared shitless. Just as the sound of the plane’s engines dissipate we start to hear all the other sounds around us. We could hear the tree branches splinter and crack, we could hear the hiss of the napalm tearing through the bushes and leaves, but then finally we could hear the screams. Screams like a chorus in a church, just a cacophony of terrified anguish. Then we realized, what the screams sounded like.”

Dan put out his smoldering cigarette in a nearby ashtray, a glossy film spreading over his eyes. He looked forward, not seeing the bar or the figure behind it.

“Apparently the higher ups had known about the building but had no idea what it was, and since they had no idea they figured their best bet was to torch it. It took all of three minutes for it to burn to the ground, but it took us only a handful of seconds to recognize those screams. When a man screams its horror, pure horror, because he knows death is waiting for him in that inferno. When a child screams…its pain and confusion. Children don’t understand why this is happening to them, they don’t understand the intensity of the pain.

“High command had no idea they were napalming a school. How could they? But we sat at the edge of those trees and listened to their screams…just…I can hear those screams…”

There were tears on his face now, freeing themselves from his eyelashes and gliding down his wrinkled cheeks.

“At one point this kid, this little girl, made it out to the clearing. She couldn’t have been more than eight, maybe nine. Her skin was melting off her arms like candle wax and she was screaming. God was she screaming. There were patches missing from her hair, and the chemicals were tearing across body, ravishing it to the point that she was almost…unrecognizable as a human. And we could smell her. She smelled like…burnt hair and leather…it was like nothing I’d ever smelled before…

“Hoot put her down. Shot her dead right there. None of us could do it, but it had to be done. The girl was walking agony. Hoot did her a favor. I remember looking around at everyone and they just wept…just wept.”

He paused for a moment, his hand going to his glass but never picking it up. His tongue worked in his mouth and he cleared his throat.

“Turns out no one had known we were out there, so close to the bombing. Command heard what happened, what we saw, and they sent us home. None of us could do it anymore. It wasn’t the same. Hoot… killed himself before we even made it to the flight home.”

Now his hand lifted the glass and a second later the whiskey was gone.

“All I wanted was for things to be back to normal. I didn’t want a hero’s welcome, or a medal, or to talk to reporters, I just wanted to go home. But when we got back, it was like we were pariahs. People jeered at us in the streets, yelled at us, blamed us for the thousands of deaths overseas for a war we didn’t even sign up for! It was hell. And all I wanted was for someone to just listen to me. I needed someone to be there for me. I didn’t want to keep my demons in.

“For years I tried. I had a wife. She listened for a while, then grew distant. She became a new person. Then one day she wasn’t listening anymore. I saw shrinks, but they just wanted to give me pills. I went to veterans’ meetings and support groups, but no one listened. They just waited for their turn to talk.”

Dan looked into Joe’s lifeless eyes.

“Then I found you, Joe. You know how to listen, zombie or not, you’re still human. You know what it’s like to be alone. To want to live again.”

Joe shuffled around once more, trapped behind the bar counter he owned in life, doomed to spend his undead afterlife within its closed confines. His old clothes were dirty and tattered around his torso, and his jaw hung slack and loose at the hinge. He groaned and his dead tongue swung pendulous in his rotted mouth.

“You get me, Joe. You want the normalcy too.”

A movement out of the corner of his eyes brought Dan back to reality. Something had moved past the doorway, something big.

Dan was off his stool in a second, his hand going to the pistol on his hip, whispering. “Hold on, Joe. I’ll be right back.”

He stepped out of the doorway as quietly as his boots would allow. Outside the sun was brilliant in a cloudless sky, casting a bright glow on the grey titan skyscrapers and on the abandoned streets. Tall green weeds were forcing their way through cracks in the sidewalks and a smell of seawater drifted over the air from the nearby wharf.

And just down the street a figure was stumbling along at the edge of the street curb, his head turned towards the sun. Dan brought his pistol level with the figure’s head. “Hey!”

The man turned with astonishing speed, his own pistol slick and silver in his hand searching for the source of the yell. At the sight of Dan his face fell from a determined scowl to unbelieving wonder.

“Oh…my God. You’re…you’re alive?” his voice was light and nasally, and his long crooked nose seemed to bob up and down as he spoke. Dan began to nod, a great toothy grin stretching ear to ear, and he holstered his gun.

The two survivors met amidst the weeds and the buildings and embraced. Embraced like they were old friends seeing each other for the first time after being apart for years. They broke from their bear hug and laughed, their voices choked, and their eyes bright and wet against the light. They took stock of one another’s haggard appearance and mangy clothes.

“Please,” Dan said gesturing towards Joe’s. “Come in for a drink.” Dan entered with the stranger behind him talking loudly, words and sentences just pouring out his mouth like a split sandbag. His eyes were cast down as he entered, but upon walking through the threshold the stranger’s nostrils flared, his hand jumped to his gun, and his eyes spotted Joe.

“Woah! Fuck man, one of them’s in here!” His gun was out of his holster, pointing at Joe before Dan had a moment to move.

“No wait!” The silver muzzle flashed, a piercing crack broke at Dan’s ears, and he saw as Joe took the bullet in his neck and fall to the floor.

The stranger holstered his gun and laughed. “Goddamn that was crazy! Like I was saying, I’ve got so many stories about these undead motherfu—”

Another crack broke through the stranger’s words.

Dan watched as the man crumpled to the floor, a yawning black and red hole now gaping where his left eye used to be. With a sigh, Dan holstered his smoking pistol, grabbed the man’s leg and dragged him outside, returning once more to his bar stool when the job was done. Over the counter he could hear Joe’s soft groans and he let go of the breath he’d been holding in. “Jesus Christ, Joe! For a minute I thought you were a goner for sure! Some survivor, didn’t even know to go for your head.”

He poured himself a full glass of whiskey and settled himself into his chair as Joe found his way back to his feet, his head hanging a little more lopsided than usual and his groans coming out a little softer. Dan took a sip off his glass and rubbed at the bridge of his nose.

“Goddamn, what a day. Anyway, that normalcy? It’s the kind of thing that makes or breaks a man. Keeps him sane. Keeps him gettin’ out of bed in the morning. And you get it.” He took another sip.

“Yes sir…we both just want everything to be normal.”