Guess it was Donny's turn to lose his cool.<br/><br/>Gale looked at Donny's mother. There was a wound on her nape, a huge chunk of her flesh ripped out by teeth. Her blood would have been red if she was still alive, but it had turned into a disgusting, sticky and squishy black liquid. It made Gale wonder. Was her own blood exactly the same as this thing she held, and what really made her and Donny different from them. They could think, but was that going to last forever?<br/><br/>The sound of a shotgun blast from the surrounding area made her look up. Someone was shooting. Donny had a shotgun. Donny was definitely horrified when he saw his zombified mother.<br/><br/>"Donny!" Gale screamed, letting go of Donny's mother. Then the scent came to her nose again, freezing her in place.<br/><br/>The smell came from a young Asian woman, holding a shotgun trained at Gale's face. The police uniform she wore immediately told Gale the obvious, though she looked so young, the age difference between her and Gale could be counted on one hand. The officer wore a typical police officer's cap, obscuring much of her short, black hair.<br/><br/>The scent came from her. Mixed in with the light smoke of her recently fired shotgun, and the decaying scent of the zombie woman beside her, Gale surmised one thing: she could smell the living.<br/><br/>"Did you speak?" asked the officer.<br/><br/>"Yeah," Gale raised her hands into the air.<br/><br/><br/>"M̼̖̣̼̃̆̍͛̃m̷̢̝̦̬̬̤̠ͤ͗͑̆̈͠m͕͚ͭ̎ͣm͇̥͖̮̹͎̯͂ͯ͗͝͠r̗̆̕ǵ̼͉͙͍̩̻̺̽͊̇̉̍̓ͅg̠̬̲̺̘̟͑͢h͍̮̜̞̆ͯͤ́ͯͪ̑ͫ́̚͢..." moaned the zombie woman. She reached out towards the officer, who took a step forward and hit Donny's mother with the butt of her shotgun.<br/><br/>Gale closed her eyes as the officer followed up with a few more hits. The smell, her imagination of what was left, and Donny's reaction afterwards, stayed in her head.<br/><br/>She could hear the woman breathing heavily after the last smash.<br/><br/>"What... happened... to... you...?" asked the officer.<br/><br/>Gale peeked out beneath her eyelids slowly, averting her gaze from the corpse's head. She looked into the woman's eyes, unsure of what to say. The entire thing that happened to Rebirth High School seemed too strange to say. But when the dead rose and attacked the living, it didn't take that much more to believe in other things. And when someone was looking at a talking zombie, Gale could probably convince them to worship her or something along those lines.<br/><br/>"I— my friend's in the house. Can we..."<br/><br/>Two zombies wandered onto Donny's lawn, growling at the police officer.<br/><br/>"Get in the house!" yelled Gale. She leapt to her feet and ran past a few more other zombies. The young girl couldn't see the officer's face, but she sort of imagined some sort of horrified expression that meant 'what the hell are you doing?!'.<br/><br/>Grabbing all the guns and shoving them into a giant bag, Gale retrieved Donny's baseball bat as well before running back into the house. She heard another horrible squelching noise, coming this time from the living room of Donny's house.<br/><br/>"Got it!" yelled the officer, standing over the body of a young teenage male.<br/><br/>Gale didn't pay attention that much attention to that. Throwing the gun bag onto a sofa, she rushed past the hastily opened doors of Donny's house.<br/><br/>"Donny! Where are you?!"<br/><br/>And when she found Donny, curled up on his bed, Gale quietly took a seat beside him.<br/><br/>"Donny... I..."<br/><br/>Donny's fingers, slowly sinking into his eyes, sent alarm bells ringing through Gale's mind. Was he trying to<span style="font-style: italic">kill</span>himself like<span style="font-style: italic">that</span>, she screamed in her head. Grabbing his hand and jerking it away from his face, Gale glared into Donny's face. But words failed her for that moment, and she couldn't imagine anything to say to him to help.<br/><br/>A few seconds later, Gale forced a smile.<br/><br/>"Donny... your mother would be glad you didn't turn into one of those... things."