Andrew awoke to someone pounding on his door. He looked around the bedroom and didn't see Natalie anywhere. His heart sank when for a moment he worried that she'd recovered enough to gather her things and leave. But then he noticed her whiskey-soiled clothes laying in a pile by the dresser.

"Mr. Price? Are you there?"

It sounded like the building maintenance guy. Andrew couldn't remember his name. Harold or Gerald or something like that.

More knocking, "Mr. Price?"

He heard the deadbolt click open and felt a momentary pang of annoyance at the intrusion, but then he heard something else.

"Oh, hello there Miss... I... Pardon me for..."

Natalie, Andrew thought. She's still here.

"Hey whattaya...? HEY!"

There was a loud crunch and then the door slammed. Andrew shot out of bed. Reaching the living room he could see that the chain on the door had been wrenched from the frame and hung down, a piece of wood still attached. By the time he realized what was going on, Natalie already had her teeth buried in the man's neck. His legs were kicking wildly but it appeared futile. He wasn't going anywhere.

"What the fuck!?"

Natalie looked up at Andrew, her mouth dripping with blood. She gave him that lopsided grin and turned back to feast on the dying man in her arms. His kicking had become more of a twitching movement. His hands fell limp beside him. Andrew could hear the wet smacking sounds Natalie made as she gnawed on the man's neck.

"Gerald!" Andrew shouted, pleased with himself for remembering. "That's his fuckin name."

Andrew was sure it said so on the patch on his blue overalls but it was obscured by all the blood. They had taken on a dark purple colour. The gravity of the moment hit him and he resisted the urge to vomit.

He gazed in stupid awe as Natalie chewed into poor Gerald's neck, and it suddenly hit him all at once: vacant eyes, limited vocabulary, recently dead, appetite for human flesh. Hadn't he described this scene a hundred times before? Hadn't he seen it thousands of times in movies and video games? Didn't he currently have a contract with a clandestine government agency to write about this very phenomenon?

Even now, as he stood face to face with it, it didn't seem real. It felt less dramatic, in a way. Less catastrophic. Less nuanced. Almost natural.

"So, that's it?" he said aloud. "I mean, that's all there is to it?"

Andrew sank to the floor and sat up against the wall, watching Natalie eat. He was surprised to find that his shock was mostly an act. More something that would be expected in the company of others, a knee-jerk reaction. He was surprised that he wasn't more upset, but there it was. It occurred to him that he himself had grown desensitized to the sort of violence that was playing out in his front entrance.

Natalie still wore his Penguins jersey, its emblem now stained bright red. The madness of the situation hit a strange nerve, and Andrew wondered for a moment where the laughter was coming from before he realized it was him. He was laughing. Laughing at the coincidence, the irony if it was that. Laughing at the expression on the Suit's face when he inevitably found out about this.

And he'd been worried about what he was going to tell the police. How would he explain this? His girlfriend – one of the undead.

Natalie tore off Gerald's left arm, and in a gesture that only set Andrew off again, she offered the dismembered limb to him. He was laughing hysterically now, so much so that tears were streaming down his face. He took the limb graciously, managed a, "Thank you," and watched as Natalie smiled and returned to her meal.

At any moment now, he thought, my mind is going to snap. This must be what going insane feels like.

But he didn't go insane. He just kept laughing maniacally until eventually he passed out. As he slipped into unconsciousness, his last thought was of Natalie, standing there in his hockey jersey, her legs bare and beautiful.