text: Leo had never seen anything quite like her. His non-beating heart twitched curiously anytime she lumbered his way. “Aannna,” he mumbled somewhat unintelligibly to himself, half aware that he was speaking her name, or at least trying to. What was it about her that made him want to rub the bloody stump that used to be his right hand through her dark, matted hair? As she approached, his question was answered in an instant. The pustules on Anna’s rancid skin danced in the moonlight like a series of volcanic island chains spewing magma into the undaunted Pacific. Her dull, lifeless eyes rolled back in their deeply set sockets like a shark after the kill. Greenish arms protruded awkwardly from her tattered Ann Taylor blouse, as she absent-mindedly jerked her way towards him. She was in a word, “prrrffeect.” Leo had fallen in love, or whatever this burning feeling was, at first sight. Actually, that isn’t fair. The first time he saw Anna, she was beating a hapless victim she had begun to dismember with his own arm, while making some hard-to-love gurgling sounds in the midst of the excitement. But that didn’t count in Leo’s mind because she never saw him peering from afar. It was as clear cut a case of a “do-over” as one could have in his mind. The next time, the true “first time,” they locked their soulless eyes on one another, she tried to kill him, and he felt the kind of terrifying love that really means something. ----------------------------- Admittedly, the pickings were slim these days, given the apocalypse and all. Sure, the world had witnessed massive outbreaks and global pandemics before, and we’ve all seen the history books filled with gruesome tails of the result. The “Plague” or Black death killed an estimated 25% to 50% of Europe’s citizens between 1347 and 1351. The Spanish Flu, Ebola, a series of coronaviruses in the 2020s - humanity has suffered mightily and lost much to these silent killers. But we had always survived, pulled together and emerged stronger. And then everything changed. A new and horrific virus, casually referred to in the media as “The Sickness,” was reported and spread like nothing that had preceded it. Scientists could not classify it, and the suddenness with which it was all around us made contact tracing to its origin impossible. We do know that the Sickness spread first to the more developed nations and populated cities of the world before making its way elsewhere. The virus seemed unperturbed by socioeconomic rankings and unmindful of expectations that power and privilege are normally inversely proportional to infection rates. It seemed to innately desire to attack positions of significant power first. Famous actors and Instagram influencers even got hit in the first wave for goodness sake. The Sickness didn’t kill. Well, at least not at first or in the ways you would think it would. Those that first contracted it seemed to suffer only from reduced mental acuity and poor balance for a week or two. But soon, the body started to mutate, subtly and internally at first, but ultimately completely and in the most grotesque ways. Zombies seemed like a ridiculous word to be throwing around initially, but it would be the closest thing to describing the abhorrent creatures that became of our friends and loved ones. Their deformed faces and olive, diseased skin betrayed the bile bubbling within them. Their stilted, purposeless walk with arms limp at their sides revealed the lack of desire to cling to anything that was once human. As the Sickness raged, infecting everyone with a speed and merciless severity hereto unexperienced in the history of humanity, we realized that death from the virus would have been a welcomed fate versus what came instead. Those infected lost the taste for normal foods within a month, water within two, and ultimately could only be satiated with the flesh of humans or other infected victims. The global infection rate was 15% within six months of the first case, 50% within nine months, and 100% within a year of its introduction. The world’s human population, celebrated as the most evolved species on the planet, was decimated and devolved in roughly a year’s time by the tiniest of microbes. ----------------------------- Some of those microbes lodged deep into Leo’s cells in the earliest days of the infection and made quick work of him. The “Turning” as it is called when the Sickness infects and mutates every cell in your body, leaving you a disgusting shell of your former self, doesn’t tickle. It is excessively painful, it is not a quick process, and it smells. Leo had lived as an only child with his mother in Bentonville, AK where she had worked as a low level WalMart executive assistant for over 30 years. The house was a modified doublewide with red brick fortifications, a small, unkempt lawn, and an attached carport that had collapsed on one side, never to be repaired. Leo had never really known his father, who purportedly owned a CBD shack three counties over that did pretty well and who steadfastly refused to acknowledge any relation to his family. For his part, Leo worked at a vintage music store called “Lionel’s Vinyls” selling the occasional forgotten LP to hipsters and failed musicians for just above minimum wage. When his mother passed following a tragic typewriting accident, Leo soldiered on in what was a fairly lonely existence in that same doublewide. His Turning was excruciatingly painful, but sometimes you have to consider the alternative. He wasn’t there to witness Anna’s Turning. Leo often pictured her body twisting and gurgling in horror, as the virus ravaged her organs and slowly boiled her skin until it turned that fateful drab green. To him, the sheer terror of it was slightly overshadowed by the base sensuality of her young, virile body giving into the overwhelming power of something sinister and unknown. She seemed 5’6 with the humped back and slouch, so maybe more like 5’8 back in those days. He imagined her with model good looks, sun-kissed skin and long golden brown hair. The way she killed with such conviction and never shared the best organs with anyone suggested to Leo that she had likely been very goal-oriented and probably an upper-level manager for some cool tech start-up or maybe an independent business owner. Either way, she wouldn’t have given him the time of day in a normal world, but this world, he knew all too well, was “nnott nurrrmaal.” ----------------------------- What became the norm in this post-apocalyptic hellscape was mass murder on a scale that would have been unimaginable to the pre-Sickness brain. A kind of Hunger Games-like phenomenon developed in every hamlet, town, and city across every country on this planet. Ghoulish zombies formed opportunistically into packs that would work together at first, but ultimately turn on each other until one victor remained. One never knew where you stood with your fellow cannibals. One day, you were working in unnatural unison like a slow-moving herd of Velociraptors hunting your doomed prey, and the next day that same herd was feasting on your small intestines without so much as a “sorry about this, Bob, we got hungry.” Scientists would argue about what caused the sudden escalation of viral intensity and sheer madness in formerly-rationale beings until their dying days, or at least until the Sickness stopped them from being able to think of such things. Climate change was a clear consensus winner, but challenging to prove definitively. Plastics were often blamed, as was the prevalence of digital devices and radio waves that weakened our immune systems and altered our environment. Everyone agreed that social media was obviously destroying the very fabric of our civilization, but that was a slower and arguably more-painful burn. In the end, no one knows what caused it. We just know that it happened, and our world changed. ----------------------------- And that suited Leo just fine. Change was something he could use a little more than most. Anything to be out of that prison of a doublewide and that rut of an existence. To be free of the same old take-out Indian food, the jeering at the hands of the neighbor kids and the long lonely nights. And the longer one survived with the Sickness, the less they remembered of their former life and the more they concentrated solely on two primal urges - devouring human flesh and sex. It’s difficult to say which of these was more disturbing to watch. Years of devouring slasher films had prepared Leo for the sight of human entrails being slurped up casually like the spaghetti-kissing scene out of “Lady and the Tramp.” He hadn’t personally taken to cannibalism as readily as some of the others, but a guy’s gotta eat, and so he could make do when necessary. And, yet, a similar dedication over the years to consuming any and all porn the internet could serve up did not prepare Leo for the disturbing sights and sounds of apocalyptic zombie-sex. It made awkward teenage-sex look like the prize winning crescendo of a Stormy Daniels “Best Of” reel. It was all flailing limbs, unnerving secretions and high pitch yelping. It happened constantly on every street corner, park and lawn. It lasted for hours. And, god, the smell. Obviously, all Leo could think about was what sex with Anna would be like. What it would sound like. What it would smell like. The thought of her that way consumed him. Ever since he had narrowly escaped her oddly powerful death grip by cutting off the lower part of his arm, all he could focus on was getting back to Anna. Admittedly, their relationship was complex and not without risk, but then again what relationship isn’t? One of the only possessions Leo had from his absent father was an old, beer-stained book of poetry of all things that he had accidentally left behind. Leo had read it cover to cover many times. When it came to Anna, it was always Alfred Tennyson’s fateful words that echoed in Leo’s one remaining ear, “Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.” Even if that meant the loss of one’s arm or perhaps a vital organ here or there. ----------------------------- Unfortunately, extreme and devastating loss was what befell the world in the awful reckoning of the Sickness. And it happened in less than two years from what we estimate to be the first wave of infections. Zombie nations hungrily reduced themselves to warring zombie factions and ultimately to increasingly-starving, roaming zombie packs. Those infected may have lost their ability to reason and communicate, but they became experts at tracking, hunting and killing with ruthless precision. In the end, we were not annihilated by weapons of mass destruction, but rather our own brute physicality and the awesome power of an unadulterated desire to kill and feed. In this way, the world’s population shrunk from billions to hundreds with the survivors willing to travel great distances to track down the last of their cursed kind. ----------------------------- Only Leo, strangely, longed for something different. Why or how, he did not know, but as the remaining zombies began to close upon him, Leo was given his chance. While ducking awkwardly into an abandoned Nordstrom’s for safe haven, he tripped over two forms squirming on the dusty floor. As he sat up and recovered his bearings, there was Anna, feasting on the remains of her latest victim, blood dripping from her cracked lips. There would never be another opportunity like this. Leo summoned all his courage. “Ith ggoo timme,” he muttered triumphantly to himself. There in the women’s unmentionables section, Leo put it all on the line. He approached Anna cautiously, watching her every move, noting every detail. She wore her kill on the front of her blouse proudly, like Joey Chestnut celebrating his record setting 75 th hot dog at the Nathan’s Famous Hot Dog-Eating Contest. There was no fear in her bloodshot eyes, but nor was their rage. She returned Leo’s gaze confidently, and maybe, just maybe, even lovingly. For the first time, Leo felt a connection, someone looking at him for him and not just as the next meal. Each lurched toward the other, their bent limbs cracking in concert as the distance between them shortened to a few feet. Leo braced himself and extended his hand, the good one, towards Anna. The drool extending from the left side of Anna’s mouth cascaded off her chin and danced magically in the wind. Her awful beauty made Leo’s crooked legs buckle. Anna, seeing his hand, paused somewhat questioningly. “Thif isss itt,” he thought. And then it happened. Anna’s veiny hand lifted to meet Leo’s, pausing to caress the bloody cuticles on each of his fingers before fully embracing his limp offering. His dead heart flickered. “Cud thif bee,” Leo dared to ask himself. It felt as if every oozing pore in his body was going to explode and that his crooked frame might actually lift off the ground all at once. And for good reason. For, as Leo stood trance-like contemplating his good fortune, Anna had stabbed him right in the gut with a shard of glass concealed in her other hand and was doggedly working on tearing a jagged line up his unsuspecting abdomen. As his blood hit the floor and began to pool, Leo snapped to and managed to weakly push Anna’s arm back, slowing the progress of his beloved killer. Enraged, Anna reached back to plunge her make-shift knife as deep into Leo’s throat as she could, but suddenly found herself slipping on the very blood she had so casually spilled. She fell backwards and plowed the back of her head into the corner of a marble display counter for women’s plus sized jeans. Whether unconscious, brain dead or just dead dead, Anna did not stir. ----------------------------- As Leo sat in a pool of his own blood, stoically eating what remained of Anna’s once beautiful corpse, he couldn’t help thinking, “thaat Tennnyshinn ith ful of shiit."