A/N: Hello friends. This is an early draft and still needs a bit of work. I am open to all constructive criticism and welcome any ideas to help the story advance. I will be posting new chapters on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. WARNING: This story contains a whole lot of swearing, violence, gore, references to suicide, sex and more unsavory topics. If you are easily offended, please move on. Happy reading...

Just keep going. Frank told himself.

He stopped, leaned over and exhaled hard, scratching his unruly beard. A bead of sweat dripped off the end of his nose dotting the sun-worn asphalt a darker grey.

He took a few additional deep breaths, then told himself again. Just keep busy. Keep fucking going.

The decomposing corpse he was laboriously dragging to the open hatch of his '99 4 Runner reeked like rancid beef jerky and was much heavier than he'd anticipated.

The body left a two-foot-wide shiny trail of dark brown goo on the road.

The person had been dead for months. The woman. The bloated, juice-heavy body was in a pretty accelerated state of decay, but he could still make out the breasts—scabbed, peeling, leaking—just fucking disgusting—hanging flaccid and wobbly like oranges at the end of a sock.

Whatever blouse or shirt she'd probably been wearing on the day she'd died had long since been torn away, snagged on a tree branch or fence or picked away by scavenger birds. Now there was just mottled grey skin and those drooping sweater cows which he was certain were female breasts.

Not man-boobs.

Man-boobs looked different. They were more like fleshy rolls stuffed with cottage cheese, creeping around the torso to cling to a wedge of back-fat. They had a different type of heft.

Frank momentarily experienced a slight twinge of self-consciousness as he regarded his own body. An unfortunate subconscious tick from the old days. He'd, at one time, been a little on the heavy side of the spectrum. Not a fat man—just a guy who really liked his beer. But now, since the world had come apart, the fast-food restaurants were non-operational and beer was a lot harder to come by, he'd unintentionally dropped a good 25 pounds with very little effort.

Not that there was anyone around to appreciate the new slimmed-down Frank.

As far as he knew, there wasn't anyone around anywhere.

He glanced back at the body he was lugging. But these... these were definitely girl-boobs. Natural female boobs. If they'd been implants, they'd still have some kind of structural rigidity. These did not. These were teetering on the edge of either becoming soup or dust.

There was no real way to determine the gender by looking at the thing's face—or the smashed-up pile of purple-black mush and splintered, pale yellow bone where a face had once been.

Of course, he could have peeked beneath the waistline of her torn, crusted jeans, but he was sure there'd be untold horrors down there. Just the thought of pulling off those denim rags, stiff with grime and filth, sent the bile lurching up the back of his throat.

Whatever was left down there was sure to be wretched and ugly.

He'd seen countless horrifically mutilated bodies since the beginning of the outbreak and over time, had gotten used to them, but every time he'd catch a glimpse of genitalia expanding in the heat, bruised and rotting—looking like a pile of slugs about to burst in a microwave, he'd instantly vomit.

He'd never understood the nudist community. Those fragile bits of the human anatomy weren't meant to be exposed to the elements. They needed to be protected and sheltered—locked away in some cotton stronghold—tucked in tightly, anchored down.

So, it was a woman, he'd decided.

And that was that.

Once he'd heaved the body the last couple of feet to his truck, he popped the back, sat under the hatch on the stained carpet, pulled off his soiled work-gloves and lit up a cigarette.

He'd been pulling the corpse by the arms. The skin had torn and bunched up around the wrists in milky folds. Fortunately, the arms had stayed attached on this one. Frank shook his head as he blew smoke at the quiet sky.

He didn't need to clean these decomposing bodies off the streets but if he didn't do something, he was sure he would've killed himself.

He needed things to feel ordered.

Not actually clean but organized and properly spaced. Things needed symmetry and structure. Frank had opted for a life of mundane routines to cast a shadow of purpose on a world that had died right before his eyes.

It all happened so quickly. The world ending.

Six months back he remembered seeing a smattering of reports on the news—with creased-brow, hyper-serious anchors gravely warning of the potential for an all-out global pandemic and then, a few weeks later, everything stopped.

No more news, no more TV, no more internet.

Information regarding the outbreak was sparse at best.

All that was clear was that people were getting sick and trying to eat each other. And then, after a person actually died, they'd slowly open their eyes, suffer a brief moment of disorientation, brush themselves off and be on their way. On to the next meal.

The media machine hadn't even had time to create a sensational, eye-catching graphic. They hadn't even given it a proper name.

Frank called it the germ.

But he knew what it really was.

Zombies.

Goddamn fucking zombies.

Frank stomped out his cigarette, put his gloves back on and heaved the ballooned sack of dead flesh up onto the bumper with a grunt. Part of her liquifying face splattered the interior panels as her head collided with the floor, adding to the abstract collage of organic gunk decorating the back of the 4 Runner.

He looked at the coagulating slime as it soaked into the carpet fibers and chastised himself for never getting around to installing some sort of tarp or plastic covering back there.

Of course, it had been three months since he'd begun hauling the dead off to the pit, with hardly a day missed, and at that point, the truck was hopelessly soiled.

He knew it didn't really matter anymore but the thought—just keeping the simple thought hovering around the back of his skull—the idea of getting a tarp, kept him closer to those first days—when maybe, just maybe, it was all just a freakish, temporary phenomenon.

Frank folded the woman's legs into the truck at an unnatural angle. She was pretty limber by the time he found her lying half-on the sidewalk in front of the Chevron station, cooking in the sun for days on end.

He wondered what her face had looked like.

Had she been pretty?

He decided to believe she had been. Even beneath all those disgusting folds—those layers of oozing skin pouches, sloshing like water in the bottom of a garbage bag. Beneath the mangled visage, the patchy remnants of lank, stringy hair clinging to the peeling scalp, the dried-out raisins that were once her eyes.

Yeah, Frank thought. She'd been beautiful.

But as was usually the case with zombies stuck outdoors, the sun had been unfriendly. Heat didn't bode well for the staggering masses. Sunlight ruined things. It made things smell worse, it softened the skin and cooked the innards which made moving the bodies decidedly messier, it slowed everything down.

Mean sun or not, it was still smarter to collect corpses in the day.

Visibility was key in surviving a zombie attack. In the day you could see where they were and gauge how sketchy a situation might be.

At night, with no electricity, they could easily sneak up on you when you were busy breaking into a department store looking for clothes—or at the Safeway, doing your best to salvage food that hadn't spoiled.

But then you'd hear a gentle shuffle and like in the movies, you'd hear the word, "brains," just a second before they'd fall on you.

They actually said the word, "brains." Somehow, even after they'd relinquished control of their primary faculties to the germ and ultimately, the unforgiving passage of time, they would still brokenly utter the word as they stumbled at you—all gangly and fetid.

Frank figured it was the clinging residue of a pop-culture-obsessed social consciousness—a staple, branded into the minds of vapid and impressionable Americans—a vague memory of an 80s era horror movie suggesting all reanimated corpses verbally identify their food before the meal.

Either everyone had seen Return of the Living Dead or they knew about it. Interesting how they didn't recite the Constitution or Shakespeare.

Evidently, some knowledge wasn't essential to modern living.

But unlike the movies, when someone first became infected, they could still communicate and exhibit at least a moderate level of civility—possessed basic conversation skills—and for all intents and purposes, seemed like normal folks with a pretty severe cold.

This made it difficult to determine who had the germ and who didn't. A fresh zombie looked no different than a normal human. They just looked a little peaked. Maybe a little drunk—like they'd been on a serious bender and were groggily suffering the pangs of a nagging hangover. And they could pretend they were alive. They had the presence of mind to play-act like a normal person to lure in their prey.

Their ability to blend into the normal population made it easy for people to cloak themselves in a very dangerous world of denial.

There were endless accounts of people becoming infected and quarantining in their homes with family. Grandma would bring a bowl of steaming soup to the person who'd contracted the germ and end up becoming the meal. But still, people would ignore the facts staring them in the soon-to-be-eaten face. They'd continue going to work, pretend not to see the cannibalistic horror scenes taking place on the side of the road during the commute. They'd tell themselves it wasn't really happening—or wouldn't happen to them.

But then it did.

It happened to everyone.

And it wasn't some low budget zombie gore flick. It was reality and it was happening all over the world.

The fucking zombie apocalypse.