It was easy to lose myself in the undeniable rhythm of searching the fourth and surprise fifth houses (it was more of a shack). It was easy to lose my mind when all there was to keep it occupied was the constant threat of illness and death.

That was if you didn't count Lynette's incessant humming, which kept me occupied in a different way. It was an irrational reaction, to be so needlessly angry at her for humming a harmless little tune. I know that. Lynette refused to let us split up after what happened at the third house and, yet, she would not stop singing a little ditty about stargazing and making sure that some game was fair. I wasn't sure if the song was suer repetitive or if she was just singing it over and over again. Either way, I did know that it was pissing me the fuck off.

Relief came in the form of a Little Caesars. Lynette didn't think it would be prudent to look through the other businesses on this little block, mostly because neither of us knew what to expect. We both worked there for a brief period, after all.

"What's the plan?" I asked, as soon as we passed the pinball machine and drink cooler in the front lobby.

"You head for the first aid kit," she instructed.

"And you?"

"I'm going to look for anything we can use as weapons or to protect ourselves."

"What, like the pizza pans?"

She nodded. "Exactly."

I nodded back. "Sure thing. One first aid kit, coming right up. Do you think I could remove it from the wall?"

"I'm sure there's boxes or bags or something if you can't."

"Right. Well."

This kitchen wasn't too different from the one that I used to work in. To my left, as I headed further back, was the pre-top station, where orders came in and pizzas were prepared. To my right were the giant conveyor belt oven and a small hall that led to the bread station (where the dough was flattened and cut), the freezer that held the meats, and the entrance to the bathroom, plus a small handwashing sink. Scattered throughout were racks that were either empty or housing rotting pizzas. Flies buzzed gently in the confines of the dirty plastic covers, laying their disgusting brood in dried sauce and slimy pepperoni.

Huh. The first aid kit wasn't on the wall next to the bathroom door. That was odd, but it wasn't unheard of. It was probably on the wall of the bathroom, then. Without thinking much about it, I tugged the bathroom door open.

Standing there, in a dirty pizza-, grease-, and blood-stained orange Little Caesar's uniform shirt was a zombified young woman with her hair pulled back in a loose ponytail. There was a small tag on her shirt that said, KELLY, MANAGER.

I slammed the door shut once again before she could reach out and attack me like the old lady did. (I was still sore about that, in more ways than one. Sure, I felt emasculated, but my arms were only just beginning to scab over and they were throbbing and alive with pain.)

I leaned my head out toward the fridge and the dish-washing area beyond, where I knew Lynette was. "Hey, Lyn? There's a zombie in here."

At first, the only response was a gasp and the clattering of metal pans on the dirty tiles. I could smell flour and mold rising from the ground. Then, Lynette yelled, "It's not the only one!"

I rushed in her direction, holding my sword like I had seen people do in movies. (That was a form of training, right? I was definitely going to survive this whole zombie apocalypse thing. I was so baller; I had this in the bag.)

When I rounded the corner of the little nook where the meat freezer was, I was greeted by the sight of Lynette staring up at a zombified man (his nametag said that he was GREG, FRANCHISE OWNER). In one hand, she held a pair of scissors (we used those to open bags of peppers and sausage). In the other, she was brandishing a burnt pizza pan like it was a shield. Her crowbar was on the ground, where she couldn't reach it.

This man was huge. I'm talking huge in the way that middle-aged men who were clearly on their high school football teams are. Greg Bossman had a gut that was sagging below the hem of his blue polo shirt (death was making him look so bad) and visible muscle in his thighs. There were maggots crawling in his hair already, like larger-than-life lice. Parts of his skin were already blackening. His teeth were fine, though, and his jaw seemed to be in working order. I could tell because he was gnashing them at Lynette.

Lynette faked him out; she made like she was going to run to the right, then booked it to the left, got behind him, did a box jump onto the metal sink (this girl could jump high), and leaped onto Greg Bossman's back. She stabbed the scissors into his eye while riding him piggyback. In retaliation, he shook her off and ripped the scissors out of his eye. Lynette landed in a pile of the little silver trays used to hold the toppings at what I only knew as the pre-top station.

I rushed over to help her in the only way I could think of: by blindly running into battle, brandishing a sword, and hoping to some go above that I could manage to tackle a grown-ass man. It took me a second to get there, though and, in that time, Greg Bossman had managed to turn to terrorize Lynette some more. When I charged with my sword drawn, I somehow struck him (that was a win for untrained swordsmen everywhere) and slammed into him. The problem was, Greg Bossman wasn't an old fucking lady. I never had any hope of taking him down, dead or not. On top of my over-all weakness, I was proven to be a klutz and an idiot. The tip of my sword broke off in his back; it disappeared into the fat and corded muscle, never to be seen again. When it broke free, I was sent flying back with my arms pinwheeling. I slipped on some old, turning-moldy flour and landed on my back. My head hit the ground and immediately filled with an intense pain that was somehow searing and throbbing at the same time.

That's why we wear our no-slip shoes in the kitchen, kids.

The pain lessened about a second later and, over the sound of my ears ringing, I could hear Kelly Manager banging rather lucklusterly on the bathroom door. I was glad that she was being useless in this fight. That made two of us.

Lynette leaped to her feet in the time that I was down and jumped in between Greg Bossman and me. Sometime between falling and getting back up, she had picked up her crowbar. She wielded it like a baseball bat and cracked him across the chin once, then again; the force of her swings, then a kick to his chest, sent Greg Bossman to the floor. Lynette, in her fury and pain, put one foot on either side of him and brought the crowbar down from over her head.

"Get me a pizza cutter!" she screamed. It sounded like her throat was raw. The pure, bloody throatiness of her yelling was made worse by the fact that she kept yelling "Fuck you!" as she hit Greg Bossman over and over again.

She wasn't blind with rage. Every time he reached for her legs to pull her down with him or tried to get up using her as a ladder, she dodged out of the way and kicked him in the ribs. His bones cracked from the repeated beating-- or were those hers? It was hard to track what was happening when I was pushing myself to my feet and running for the silver, water-filled sink, reaching through the film of days-old soap, grease, and mucus to the cold gray water and freezing metal utensils beneath. I pulled out the blades she wanted, the circular pizza cutters she requested; I held them over my head as I rushed them to her like they were the Holy Grail.

Greg Bossman was trying to bite her ankle with his mess-up red, watery pulp of a face (I could see the rotting parts of him underneath). In his weakness, he couldn't bite through the denim of her mom-jeans.

That pissed me the hell off. While I handed off the stupid fucking pizza cutters to Lynette, who immediately began to line them up along his neck, I kicked that bitch in the head. Fuck zombie bastards who try to bite people's ankles, that's what I say.

I feel like I should say that, once again, I was a clumsy idiot, because I slipped on flour once again and hit my head against the black rubber mat in front of the sinks. Sure, it was softer than the tile, but it still hurt, and the weird lattice pattern of it didn't help things.

And then Lynette jumped on the pizza cutters.

On the one hand, it was a great idea, because the force of her feet landing on the handles severed Greg Bossman's spinal cord. On the other, it was a horrible one, because it nearly did the same to the soles of her feet. The circular blades turned on her; they cut through the thick outer soles of her shoes and through to her socks; they split the pretzel-patterned fabric and nearly split her skin. I wouldn't have been surprised if they did.

Lynette didn't seem nearly as torn-up about killing this guy. Maybe it was because he seemed to be more recently-turned (the rot hadn't set in as much; he didn't positively reek of it in the way that the entire harder house did), or maybe it was because Lynette was naturally inclined to want to beat up Little Caesar's Franchise Owners.

Her shoes were basically useless now (they had huge gaping holes in them), but who was I to judge?

I sighed and, head still pounding, went to get the first aid kit from the bathroom. I was sure that I could grab it then close the door just as quickly. Apparently, I never learn anything. I'm the kind of character in a horror movie that is canonically warned about wandering off, venturing into the woods, or climbing the dark stairs down into the darker basement, and, yet, does those things anyway. I could practically hear the audience yelling, "Don't go in there!" and I did it anyway.

It backfired majorly. Kelly Manager practically fell out onto me, pushing me back into a rack of bottled, shelf-stable, name-brand bottled drinks. I hit my head again and the entire movable shelf rattled. Luckily, the shelves caught on some broken-down cardboard boxes that were shoved under the bread station, which allowed me to refrain from falling on my ass.

I had the bright idea to heat-butt Kelly Manager. It absolutely did not work. All I did was hurt myself against the hard bone of her nearly-detached exterior jaw.

Lynette came to my rescue once again, with the crowbar. She hit this zombified woman once, then twice. I got the sense that, because Kelly Manager was so occupied with trying to hold me to the shelf and crack open my skull like a walnut, it gave Lynette a sort of advantage when it came to hitting her.

On top of everything else that was happening, my scratched from the old lady's hands were bleeding again. Something had reopened them-- though, I suppose, they were never closed, to begin with.

I was able to predict Kelly Manager's next move as soon as she opened her mouth (read: unhinged her jaw). I reached behind me and grabbed a random bottle to shove into her mouth so that my skull wouldn't be targeted. I didn't feel like getting infected any time soon.

"What the fuck?" I screamed. Now my throat was feeling raw.

That's the thing about fighting. You would think there would be more witty one-liners or intense back-and-forth banter, but there wasn't. There were just two college freshmen screaming curse words while they kicked the shit out of things until they lost their voices. There was no comic book glamour here. There was just me and all this dirty flour n the ground.

I screamed because the bottle splintered from the force of Kelly Manager's bite and I got an explosion of Mountain Dew Voltage in my wounded arms and unexpecting face. This was not an epic gamer moment.

At the same time that the blue soda burst forth, Lynette was bringing her crowbar down on Kelly Manager's head. She seemed to be so shocked by that specific event that she missed Kelly Manager's head entirely and nearly dropped it. Luckily, Lynette was able to shake herself out of it and scraped her crowbar from the side so that it tugged into the back of the zombie's neck, then yanked it. In one motion, she had torn out the heck of the thing pinning me to a dirty rack. Kelly Manager crumpled to the ground before she could tear the flesh from my face with her nasty, yellowed teeth.

As the thing between us stopped twitching, Lynette giggled. "Poggers."

"Oh, ew. That's cringe. Did you really just say that?"

"Shut up. It's going to catch on, just you see."

"Sure, Lyn."

"I'm telling you, it will! Just you wait."

"I don't believe you." I took a heaving breath and, trying to be serious for a moment, reached into the bathroom to grab the giant metal first aid it. It wasn't attached to the wall or anything. It was just sitting there, on the metal shelf, between a giant brown roll of thin paper towels and a collection of cleaning chemicals.

Lynette stepped over the corpse of Kelly Manager to shove some loose water bottles and sodas into the pockets of her jeans; she grabbed a case of water. "You grab one, too," she demanded. "It's time to meet up with Petey and Lew."

I rolled my eyes. "God, you love to call the shots."

"I'm the one saving your life, kid."

"You're younger than me."

She nudged me in my (bruised-- I didn't know it was bruised before, but I did now) hip with the case of bottles. "Come on. I'm right and you know it, Mister Pedant."

I sighed. "Yeah. Yeah, I do."