I’m going to be honest right out of the gate: my memory is crap. There’re fragments in here that are mine—I have to believe that—but all of my legitimate memories are floating in this soupy sea of unknowns and shadow puppets. I don’t know what they did to me—or even who “they” are—but I’m working on it. I aim to find out the truth, I’m just not there yet. There is one thing that I do know for certain, and that’s this: if I don’t recount what happened yesterday, then I’ve let “them” win. 

A couple of months ago, the world ended. The start of The End comes to me in flashes, but now I’m not sure how many of those flashes are real. My strongest memory is still of my mother screaming at me to run while Biters gorged themselves on her flesh, and of me running away from her into the chaotic streets of Firefly City. I have this blurry idea that I spent the next few weeks in a constant go-mode—that I was endlessly on the run, every wheezing breath painfully reminding me of why I was skipped over for the football team all four years of high school. Needless to say, I thought I was a dead man walking (not to be confused with the literal horde of walking dead men). 

I “remember” that about a month ago, I broke into the Zenith: the biggest, the ugliest, and the most absurdly expensive hotel in town. Twenty-four floors, including the basement—all gilded in gold and art-deco kitsch, a real testament to the capitalistic condition. Turns out that the basement made the perfect apocalypse bunker. Isn’t it funny how a place designed as a getaway can become a prison—just like that? All it takes is a small push, a little shift in the basic nature of our world. A zombie apocalypse, for example. 

Although all of the hotel guests were either dead or turned, some of the hotel staff were still alive. They’d hunkered down in the Zenith’s basement; a fortified bunker—the genuine article, military-grade rations and everything. They told me the basement was originally the hotel’s storage, complete with a wine cellar. But once the wine was gone it turned kind of bleak down there.

Then there was yesterday.

I woke up around six in the morning, according to my watch. I’d slept on the floor again, like the gentleman I am. I sat up and yawned, rubbing a sleepy eye and mindlessly scratching that sad patch of blonde stubble on my chin. I was still completely dressed from the day before, and the day before, and the day before, and I think you get the idea. 

I’m still wearing those clothes now: checkered slip-ons, mismatched socks, dark-wash jeans with a second-hand belt (though the stupid jeans still refuse to stay up), my Elkshore National Park t-shirt, and a green-and-orange trucker hat that I don’t have any particular attachment to. It’s just the only hat that fits my stupid big head. That’s not some metaphor—I really just have an annoyingly large cranium. There’s also my varsity jacket—black with minty green trim, a smattering of old art-club patches along the sleeves and back with my surname across the shoulders. 

As soon as I got up, I scanned the array of drowsy survivors for my one-and-only ally, Sally. She was my anchor. Cheesy-sounding, I know, but it was true. If I were one of those romantic artists of old, I guess I’d call her my muse, but that’s almost worse, I think… 

Sally was the only other teenager held up in the Zenith, and to be honest I never really talked to the others anyway; if I were asked to pick out their faces in a crowd, I’d only be able to point out Sally’s. I think another thing is that Sally was real in a way I wasn’t—she thrived under pressure and kept in good shape, both mentally and physically.  She was a year older than me and a head taller, with features that any artist couldn’t help but admire. Her skin was tan like caramel, with freckles that only sat on her nose—a nose that was slightly crooked, but it really suited her bone structure that way. She had this sandy-blond hair that was cut short, with fluffy middle-part bangs that were longer. Best way I can put it is that she was kind of like if a Disney prince were redrawn as a hot nineteen-year-old girl.

I spotted Sally standing by the elevator, listening to her walkie-talkie. She looked at me as I approached her. I knew that there was only one person she could be talking to, and that was Clara Knox. 

Clara Knox ran things around the Zenith—not that anyone asked her to. She lived on the top floor, according to her, and had been the Zenith’s manager before The End. She was pretty self-conceited because she knew every inch of the hotel—every hall, and every room, and every door, and every floor—and apparently, based on the tone of her voice, that made her better than us.

Sally’s conversation ended just before I reached her. She glared down at me but I could tell that the glare was directed at the imperceivable Knox, not at me. For some reason, Sally never really glared at me. She actually thought I was sort of cool, somehow. 

“I’m going on a food run,” she said hesitantly.  There really wasn’t a surprise there—Sally did all the food runs. Then she added: “Knox wants you to go with me.”

My body went cold. I stared up at Sally with this stupid pleading expression in my eyes. 

“No way,” I said. “No-no-no-no, is she crazy? I can’t go out there! I—I—” I couldn’t really get the words out. My mother’s face flashed like lightning in my head and I recalled the sheer desperation in her voice. Fact was that I hadn’t left the bunker since arriving. It’s not that I didn’t want to be helpful, it’s that I was scared of dying. I wasn’t wired to play the hero, not like Sally.

Sally put the walkie-talkie onto one of the nearby storage shelves, then plopped her left hand down on top of my head. She did that a lot when she wanted to get real with me. 

“Roy,” she said, her eyes boring into mine. “Stay behind me and watch your feet, then you’ll be fine.” She turned away and picked up the wooden, nail-covered baseball bat leaning next to the elevator. That was her favorite weapon of choice—she loved the classics. “I’m not going to let you get bit,” she added, glancing back at me. “If you die I’ll have nobody to not-glare at.”

I smiled. Underneath that smile, though, was a painful desire to prove, somehow, that I wasn’t scared. 

Shove it down, I thought. Man up. 

“I’m not scared of dying,” I said. “But for you, Sally, I’ll try not to bite it.”

“Uh—poor choice of words,” she laughed. I laughed, too—it was kind of nice. Unfortunately, the tight pit of anxiety cartwheeling in my stomach didn’t really care. The fear got stronger until all I could think of was that I didn’t want to lose her too—not that she was mine, or anything. I could feel my palms sweating, so I shoved them into my jacket pockets. I followed Sally into the elevator and we started ascending to the twelfth floor.

We stood side by side, both of us leaning against the back wall. Somewhere between floors eight and nine, Sally turned to me. I could tell she wanted to say something, but she didn’t. She turned away again. 

“I’m good,” I said. 

“I didn’t ask.”

“You didn’t ask very, very loudly.” I grinned, like a liar. “I can handle it, Sally.”

The doors opened. Sally poked her head out, scanning the once rich-blooded terrain.  

Everything was so quiet. That was the worst part of it all: the silence. You can’t see silence coming. 

The dead—or, I guess, the undead—don’t do much when left alone, they just sit and wait in a twisted cycle of decaying and un-decaying. But they can smell you, and they move fast and quiet, like air through the vents. So everything’s just…silent.

I peeked over Sally’s shoulder, trying to get an idea of what I was in for. Despite the massive, arching windows lining the walls and the golden chandeliers glittering the ceilings, my eyes were immediately drawn to the bodies. There were a lot of bodies, lying around—on the floor, slumped over the tables and chairs, propped up against the walls with their heads hanging low. 

Then the smell hooked my nose. It was so rank that it made my bones hurt. Amidst the bodies, which definitely contributed to the smell, there were plates upon plates of food. Some of those plates were still on the tables, some on the floor, and some were shattered with the food now smeared into the bloodstained carpet. All of it was either stale or rotting, and my nose burned with the scent. 

It seems weird for me to say “thankfully” about anything in reference to a sea of the dead, but in this context, I’m sure it will be acceptable: thankfully, these bodies weren’t Biters. Biters get this black stuff all up in their veins, like inky lightening scars on every inch of their pale, peeling skin. Problem is, you can’t really tell when a body’s gonna turn—and not all of them do, it’s just one of those things. My mom, for example: she didn’t get undead. She just got dead. But I guess that’s better than turning. 

The door to the kitchen was, inconveniently, on the opposite end of the room. Sally pointed it out to me: two giant, gilded double doors, each side fitted with a small porthole. She took me by the hand, the bat in her free one, and started weaving us through the dead sea. I tried to keep my eyes at my feet, painfully aware of how fast a Biter could grab my ankles. 

Stale food crunched under our shoes as we crept across the floor. The sound of it was dull and quiet, like someone in the room—or the room itself—was chewing something but trying to hide the fact that they were chewing something. Sally’s eyes were locked forward. Her grip on me was tight.

I couldn’t help but keep glancing up at the windows lining the walls. It took me a second to figure out why, but then it hit me: the lighting. 

Maybe it was because I’d been living in the basement for a few weeks, or maybe it was because, back in high school, I was an art club president with no life (if you’ll pardon the expression), but I felt like the shadows were off. As I squinted out the window at the pretty ugly view of Firefly City’s tightly-packed apartment buildings, I swore there was a discrepancy. The shadows inside and the shadows outside seemed to come from two different suns. 

Maybe I was losing it. This feeling crept up my neck, though—like it was also too bright to be a little past six in the morning. I quickly chocked that up to being a basement-dweller. 

Yeah, I thought, I’m just losing it. 

So, just like the fear, I shoved it down and said that I was fine, and everything around me was fine too.

After three agonizing minutes, we made it to the kitchen doors. Sally nodded for me to stay back. Once she was done peering through the portholes, she waved me over to her side. She pointed at my jacket, which is when I remembered that freezers are cold. I wriggled my jacket off and handed it to her. She leaned her bat against the wall and slipped the jacket on. It looked better on her, I think—the arms fit perfectly but it was a little short in the waist which, paired with her high-waisted jeans, came off as being intentionally cropped. 

She gave me a thumbs up,  which I mimicked, then gestured for me to stay put. She pushed her way into the kitchen, the doors swinging in and out for a few moments after, like saloon doors. I stepped over to the right and leaned against the wall, face against the window there. 

The more I stared out into the world, twelve stories above the infestation, the more everything seemed wrong. Funny how, even amidst a zombie outbreak, something can feel even more wrong. Was it the perspective? The depth of field? My mind was racing through all the photo studies I’d done and all the still-lifes I’d worked on in class. The buildings furthest away seemed to lack definition—and the blacks in the shadows were kinda too black. And the clouds were drifting across the sky and the trees were swaying in the wind, but the motion of both felt weird; the blur was almost too blurry, somehow. 

The fear rose further, like a soda can building pressure on a drive up into the mountains.

Sally reemerged with a giant box of frozen burritos, which she handed over to me. The icy cardboard bit at my bare arms. On top of that, she put a few boxes of Eggos, which barely left my vision unobstructed. Sally picked up her bat and then off we were, crunching our way back to the elevator doors. But we walked slower this time because I couldn’t see well and Sally wasn’t going to let me out of her sight. With each step I got this awful feeling in my stomach, like butterflies but worse. Moths, I guess? I shoved them down again to the best of my ability, my thoughts all muttering a loop of you’re fine you’re fine you’re fine. 

There was a crash, and I flinched bad. I clutched the burrito box tighter to my chest but the Eggos tumbled to the floor. Sally stopped moving instantly, eyes shooting over to the direction of the clatter. With my blood flooded with cold and my stomach rising with nausea, I forced my head to look where Sally was staring. 

A Biter, about twenty paces to our right. I stared at it as if it was my first time seeing one. It was clutching a blood-and-food-stained tablecloth in its black-veined hand—the thing had tugged it right off of the table, I think, sending the dishes to the floor. It stood still as we stared at it. One eye was missing, socket gaping and inky. The other eye was sunken in, the iris white and the sclera pitch black. There was a withered hole in the center of its face where the nose had been. Its skin oozed black inky stuff, but at the same time looked caked and dry, flaking off like bits of beef jerky. It cocked its head. Flicked its tongue in and out in a quick, unsettling flash, like it was tasting the air. 

Its eye locked on me.

It bolted towards us, dropping the tablecloth and extending its sinewy arms, fingers broken and flexed into claws. Its jaw unhinged, almost breaking at the joint, revealing yellow rotting teeth and an ichorous black tongue. Cold, sharp fear shot through me like a bullet, but I couldn’t move. No fight or flight, just a big blank. 

Call me the poster boy for natural selection; I’ve got that side of things down. Sally, though, jumped into action immediately, crossing in front of me and bringing her bat back, keeping it hovering over her right shoulder, both hands firmly on the fabric-wrapped grip. The thing was at us in an instant, gurgling and hissing and spitting—Sally swung at it, but it dipped under, dashing at me. Instinctually I threw the box forward, clocking the Biter in the face. I heard the spine snap. It kept moving, snapping its head back forward to face me. Sally swung the bat again, and this time it connected with the Biter’s shoulder with a gut-wrenching crack! 

Still, it kept moving. It grabbed me with its twisted fingers, latching onto the neck of my t-shirt. It yanked at me, trying to pull me closer to its unhinged maw. It snapped its jaws at me with frightening speed and I reeled my head back to avoid the spray of inky spit. 

I had never been grappled by a Biter before—I didn’t know they were so strong. I struggled hard against the force of its pulling, using my whole body to lean away. I thought the seams in my shirt were gonna snap; I could feel the back of the collar digging into my neck like a garrote. It was the end, I thought, for sure.

Sally came up behind the Biter and full-sent her bat at the thing’s head. The bat bore right through the skull—it looked like someone shooting a watermelon with a spud gun. The head tore clean in two, separating just above the bridge of where his nose used to be. A fountain of thick black ooze erupted from the exposed section of the bottom jaw. 

But even that didn’t bring it down. Its grip remained tight and I kept straining away from it. Sally raised the bat high up above her head. 

SMASH!

She brought the bat down onto where the Biter’s head had been. Her bat plowed through a good three inches before it stopped, lodged in the Biter’s chest just above his left lung. The force of the hit sent the Biter’s body straight to the floor. Now lacking a proper counterweight, I shot backwards and slammed into the window. I cracked my head like whiplash against the glass. I felt it crunch at the weight of my skull, but I didn’t hear it shatter. I lost my balance and sagged to the floor, my shirt and face both soaked in Biter blood, which smelled like something between insulin and gasoline. I stared at Sally as she watched the Biter twitch on the ground, her bat still lodged in its chest. Her face was splattered with blood too, but my artistic sense decided that it suited her. 

I got up, slowly. I went to brush the glass out of my hair. Then I realized that there was no glass in it. I looked around the floor where I had fallen. No glass there either. 

I looked at the window. There was a crack in it like a spiderweb, from where my head had slammed into it. The crack spiraled from edge to edge of the massive window frame and, well…parts of it were missing. Not broken-off-in-shards type missing. I mean to say that there were massive chunks of the outside view that were replaced with solid splotches of blue and black, words flickering in the middle of the color strips: 

ERROR 3-13 — INTERNAL IMAGE BREACH

The mass of compressed fear in me erupted. I still don’t really know what came over me, really—calling it a panic attack just wouldn’t cut it, although panic was part of it. The other part was like that one time my mom filmed my entire piano recital, only afterward realizing that she had recorded over the footage from our trip to Elkshore National Park. 

Sounds strange, I know, but as I stared at that window and registered that it was a glitching, breaking screen, I had this sudden feeling that my memories had been recorded over something else. What was real? Was any of it? Then it hit me—if nothing around me was real, then who was that face in my memories, the face of my mother? Tears welled up in my eyes and there was nothing I could do to stop them this time. I sobbed—struggled to breathe. It hurt. I let it. 

CRASH!

Sally whipped her bat past my face and slammed into the screen. I flinched backward, startled out of my near-catatonic state. As I stared at Sally’s face, I had a feeling that it mimicked my own. Her blue-green eyes were wide and she looked kind of far away—and not a happy, peaceful kind of far away. I looked back to the screen. More blue error-coded chunks had swallowed up the outside world. Sally kept hitting it, silent tears rolling down her elegant cheeks. She hit it and hit it until chunks of the screen crumbled to the floor, revealing an off-white expanse of drywall behind it. She started to hit that too, bursting through to the space-between-spaces, which was backed by sheet metal. She went at the back wall, slamming the bat into it again, again, again—the sheet metal denting with each new swing. 

Clang! 

Clang! 

Clang! 

And I just watched her do it, unable to be of any use or any comfort or anything other than a helpless observer. But I knew what she was thinking—her bat screamed the question with each bash: What. Was. The. Point. 

As more of the wall puckered, the more wild Sally’s eyes became, and the more certain I was that she was realizing the truth. It was like when I joined the drama club. On closing night, you stand in a line, and slowly the big curtain in front of you starts to pull open. And then you get it. The more light that pours through to your eyes, the more faces in the audience that you can make out through the glare—you see it and know that after you bow, you’re done. It’s over. You go home.

The wall opened up like a curtain call. Light poured in through it like sycophantic applause, faintly blue. Moonlight. The dark sky was smattered with stars, like celestial freckles. I blinked away my tears, trying to catch my breath, realizing that the ground outside was right at our feet and not twelve stories down. And the ground was covered in tall blades of shimmering grass, swaying softly in the night breeze. I brushed past Sally and tried to step out—she stopped me, grabbing me by the arm. I looked up at her. 

“Don’t,” she managed to say. Her voice was strained, like she was one wrong word away from bursting into tears like I had.

“Why…?” That was all I could get out. 

“You don’t know what’s out there.”

“But there’s something.”

Sally’s grip tightened, but it didn’t seem like a threat. It seemed like desperation. I pried her hand from my arm and laced her fingers in mine. We walked out together, slowly. 

It was quiet, but it was nice—it was an empty silence. All around us were rolling hills of dark greenish-grey that seemed to go on forever. I looked behind us at the building, still expecting to see the Zenith, somehow, even though I wasn’t even sure such a place existed outside of my head. Turns out even that was fake. We’d stepped out of a giant, square, ultra-modern-looking building with no windows or doors from what I could see. I broke away from Sally and started to circle it, almost marveling at the ridiculousness of it. On the side adjacent to the one we’d broken out of, there was a dark metal plaque glinting in the moonlight, fastened to the wall with giant rivets: 

The Humminghouse 

Property of the Dreamwood Corporation,

Under the supervision of Dr. Clara Knox.

No trespassing. 

“Sally,” I muttered, though mostly to myself. “I don’t think there is an apocalypse.”

Sally’s response was instant, with a sour lick of sorrow in it that I’d never heard come from her lips before: “If that’s the case, then what am I supposed to do.” 

It didn’t really sound like a question.

“We should get out of here,” I suggested. 

Sally wiped her eyes on the sleeve of my varsity jacket, which she was still wearing. 

“What would be the point,” she said. Again, it didn’t sound much like a question. I looked at her; her eyes glittered in the pale blue light. I wanted to tell her that she didn’t need an apocalypse to give her life meaning—that she was more than a food runner or something—but I couldn’t. My head was too full with thoughts of my mother. If there was no apocalypse, that meant she was alive. I needed her to be alive.

Once again, I took Sally by the hand, then I picked a direction. As we walked on and on into more of the same endless hills, I started to get that nervous feeling in my stomach. This time, I let it be but I didn’t let it get to me; felt it, but at the same time I didn’t. I took a deep breath. 

So there isn’t an apocalypse, I thought. What is there? 

To me, it was a question, and it was teeming with possible answers. 

And I’m still not sure what there is out here in the real world…

But I’m looking forward to finding out.

Listen to the audio version below:

Lucy Grecu

Lucy is currently a second-year apprentice at The Company. She grew up in Los Angeles, California, and spent nearly every summer doing musical theater camp. Lucy spends her time drawing fictional characters, reading novels very slowly, and getting her friends to watch every movie she considers a classic. You can find her at LucyGrecu.com, where she blogs about the mundane curiosities of life!