Whoever said zombies' bite is the most dangerous thing about them never survived the apocalypse, Jason mused.

He glanced across the hall of the concrete parking garage where he crouched. Incessant moans of the undead hordes  drifted eerily up the cracked ramparts of the structure from somewhere below. The noises came in perpetually random choruses of drawling cries, creeping through his ears to waged war agains this sanity.  Every breath, scrape, shuffle, and moan was like a metal file dragging across his brain until he was left crouching with his calloused hands clasped around his ears.

A new sound - the repetition of steps - approached him.

Jason looked up gratefully. "Alice. You're back." 

A short girl looked frowned down at him, which struck him as odd since she was in no shape to show concern for anyone but herself. Her long brown hair was drawn back in a narrow ponytail caked with dirt and blood drying the hair together. Grime covered her face like a mask except for a narrow strip of pale skin stitched with scars and glistening with sweat. Two green eyes hooded with exhaustion stared down in a half-blank, half-concerned gaze. 

She moved her hand to rest on a black leather strap that hung around her waist. Two pistol holsters - one torn half-open - hung from her belt besides several packets of additional ammunition that clinked with every step. Her green tank-top hung loosely from her narrow shoulders, but a similar strap as belt wrapped diagonally from her shoulders where a long hunting dagger hung. 

"You look like hell, mate," she murmured with a small smile. 

"You don't look so good yourself." 

"Yeah, well, the end of the world tends to do that to you." 

She hung her head. "You can say that again." 

The moans and scraping of the hordes far below them filled the empty gap for a moment. 

"So do we have an exit strategy?" he finally asked. 

Alice nodded. "Yep, the walkers are coming up the C-9 rramp right now. We've got maybe another half hour before we're in a critical situation." 

"You mean more critical than being surrounded by an undead population of hellish demons focused on spilling our brains from our heads in the last standing fortified structure in the city." 

"Right," she grinned, "besides that. I say we take the explosives and blast the crud out of 'em. Then we high-tale it out of here and show them what it means to be alive." 

"Nice," he chuckled dryly. "And what does that actually equate to?" 

She sighed. "We plant the charges on the underside of the C-9 ramp. Then we detonate them and rappel down the concrete, blowing their faces off as necessary." 

"Cool. Let's go." Jason stooped to retrieve a battered canvass satchel and dented shotgun from the garage floor. "Lead the way." 

Alice nodded and led him back down the shadowy halls of the parking structure. Their footsteps barely echoed above the drawling cries of the zombie mobs in sorrowful tributes of loneliness. 

They finally turned the corner to look down the ramp extending into the lower floors. A long black path curved downward beside a battered metal sign that read 'C-9' in peeling red paint. 

A single grey figure shuffled up the cracked concrete road. Discolored clothes hung in tattered scraps from the monstrous form's shriveled body. Its feet slowly lifted and dropped in uneven, scraping steps that further tore the shredded skin on what was left of its feet. 

Alice drew a pistol from her belt and pointed it toward the monster. "You want to plant the charges?" she asked, lightly pulling the trigger. 

BANG.

"Sure thing," Jason answered over the sound of the zombie's corpse striking the ground. A dull scratch hissed along the hall as the body slid in an agonizingly slow descent down the ramp. 

He knelt and threw open the bag, pulling out half a dozen grenades and a roll of silver duct tape. Peeling off two long strips, he pasted the grenade to the ground in a large X before repeating the process with the other five. 

"Hand me a string?" 

Alice nodded, fishing a chord out of her pocket and handing it to him. 

He accepted it quickly and carefully tied it around the first grenade's pin before stringing it through and tying it to the other's pins. He ran the remaining chord toward the hall, through the metal railing beside the ramp. 

"And now we wait." 

The two sat beside the ramp idly, letting their legs hang over the ledge. Over time the sound of the moaning, sputtering, and scratching grew gradually louder but the friends stubbornly remained. 

"So..." Jason muttered. 

"Yeah," Alice finished with a smile. "So." 

"What's your favorite color?" 

A mirthful laugh overwhelmed the zombies' crawling. "Blue," she finally replied. "When you come out in the morning and look up into the sky and there isn't a cloud out there. It's so peacefully reassuring, like there are no limits. No stops. You can do anything. What about you?" 

"I don't know," he shrugged. "I think black. When I was a kid I used to go camping with my brother and the black of night always scared him but not me." Jason shook his head. "I guess I loved the options. There could be heaven or hell standing five feet away from you and you'd never know it." 

Alice shifted on the floor, crossing her arms over the twisted metal railing. "Alright, favorite food?" 

"Steak, no question. Just the right amount of pink on the inside with a nice batch of buttered mushrooms on top. I've never known someone to turn down a steak like that." 

"That's not bad, but honestly hotdogs always struck me just as good as any steak." Alice could not help but laughing at his incredulously speechless expression. "What? Give me a good New York hotdog any day and you'll have a happy girl." 

"Favorite place in the world?" 

Her smile gradually faded in the grey half-light of the garage. "They're all about the same now, I guess... But when I was little, it was my grandparents house in Michigan. They lived on the lake in this beautiful two-story house. I was so little it seemed like a mansion. Anyway, there was this mile-or-so stretch of sand down to the most beautiful lakefront you've ever seen and we'd spend the entire day having adventures. Then at night gram would cook us spaghetti and we'd play dominoes..." 

She paused to wipe something from her eye. It might have been a speck of dirt or bead of sweat, but Jason knew better. 

He scooted closer and wrapped an arm around her. 

"It won't be much longer."

She nodded wordlessly, refusing to look up. Instead she just leaned next to him and listened to the agonizing, chaotic, disarming music of the creatures below as they shuffled on. 

"How about you?" she finally whispered. 

"Right here," he answered immediately. 

Alice chuckled again, turning to look at him. "You have got to be kidding me." 

He shook his head. "Nope, this is it. Right here. With you. I've got nowhere else." 

Their eyes locked for a moment before she leaned in to gently peck him on the cheek. Neither said a word. 

Another ten minutes did not go by before the grey forms of the zombie mob was finally visible inching up the ramp. Jason could hardly let himself look but he could not keep his eyes away. Against his will they scanned the deformed, defamed, distorted persons that inhumanly crawled, dragged, or carried themselves up the parking structure. The few eyes that remained in the rotten, shattered sockets of their skulls stared with blind craving forward as if they were just sleepwalkers going through some horrifying nightmare. 

Jason grabbed the rail and pulled himself up. "It's time." 

Beside him Alice hesitantly withdrew her guns. "Guess it is." 

He grabbed the chord that sat beside them and strung its full length out until it was piled on the ground at his feet. 

Holding the end of the string, he led Alice back around the corner to crouch behind the hulking concrete wall that separated the garage floor from the entry ramp. Looking up, he mentally assured himself the steel beams holding the ceiling above them up would not give out. 

Glancing to Alice, he gave a thumbs-up. She held her hands - guns still grasped - over her ears and stuck a thumb in the air. 

Before he let himself hesitate, his hand yanked the chord. The sound of a chorus of pins clattering across the ground drifted around the corner just as the frantic tick, tick, tick, of the grenades' timers chirped over the lamenting of the zombies. 

Then - for a second - there was silence. 

It was as though the planet had exploded from the inside out. Heat, pain, fire, fear, anger, confusion, and noise erupted from every direction. Somewhere in the recesses of his mind that remained unhindered by his screaming instincts told him that it all had come from the grenades, but his conscious thought had fled amid the horror the explosion. Left had become right, right had become wrong, up and become down, and down had become the way he was falling. 

Everything around him was breaking, broken, on fire, or some gruesome combination of the three. At first the bellowing roars of concrete crumbling in boulders to the ground and voracious crackling of flames filled his ears amid the overarching ringing that refused to give him peace. Then it was all gone. He could hear nothing - not the tumbling of rubble against the ground or even the scream of his own voice. 

The smell of repulsive smell of burning flesh set his burning skin tingling but it was the thick scent of irony blood that had him crawling frantically. He did not know where he was or where he was going but he knew he had to get away. Pain etched its flaming marks into his hands and knees as he tried to scuttle through the falling, fiery wreckage. 

It struck him that he had fallen on the ground.  

Crawling through the dust-filled clouds of debris, a grotesque form blocked his way. A tall zombie with his entire left side from shoulder to waist sheered off in a sickening black twist of flesh shuffled toward him as the tongues of fire crawled up its arm and leg. 

Instinctively Jason pulled drew his shotgun - which had somehow remained beside him - and fired a blind shot at the sickening creature. The top half of the zombie disappeared in shower of black dust, leaving its legs to fall into the flames. 

He did not know how long he crawled for or even where he ended up. The entire world had become like a soundless slideshow that he was watching from a distance. Every movement and sense felt eerily surreal. At last it occurred to him that he had crawled out from the rubble. The ground beneath him was sandy and hard, but bore no marks of the explosion. 

He finally fell on his back, looking up at the sky. It was blue. Serenely, peacefully blue. 

Alice. 

The name hit him like a bullet. Sitting upright quickly enough to send his head spinning, he gazed toward the wreckage. 

The entire garage complex - or what had been left of it - had come down. Empty hovels and sand-strewn ruins of the buildings around it sat in mocking calmness around the jagged heap of rubble that had become the garage. Fires burned around it in a veritable mountain of steel, concrete, and flames where nothing but wavering tongues of fire moved. 

Jason could feel his cracked lips, blistered by the scorching heat, parting. "Alice," he croaked. He could not hear his own voice, but he knew it was scarcely more than a whisper. Trying again, he could hardly fill his lungs with enough air to murmur her name into the parched desert air of the desolation that surrounded him. 

His eyes drifted despairingly to his torso. Jeans largely blown away, the gruesome sight of black and red covering his legs greeted him. Smoke curled from what might have been fabric or flesh but his skin refused to register any of it. 

Laying his head back against the sand, his eyes stared up into the blue. It really is peaceful. His eyelids bowed heavily. A tiny voice whispered in the back of his mind that he could not sleep. He could not close his eyes or else... I'll look for her when I wake up. She'll be okay until then. Yet deep down he knew what had happened. 

He knew how it would end. 

Somebody... Somebody had to be the last.