People continued to deny it, until they couldn't—until they contracted the germ and tried to tear out the throat of the person sitting next to them on the bus.

At first, apart from the ravenous hunger they'd experience, they'd been able to maintain an alarming level of cognizance and cunning. But as time stretched on and they ran out of people to eat they became slow, weak and bumbling.

After a week infected, the germ would lay siege on muscle tissue and attenuate motor function down to the barest necessity. Their joints became stiff and arthritic. They couldn't control their grip so they couldn't hold weapons or drive cars or even grab hold of you with any real strength.

By the second week, things really started to take a turn for the worse. The natural progression of death was taking its toll. Speech patterns would break down—their words slurred together nonsensically—which eventually became nothing more than guttural grunts and wheezes. And as the speech deteriorated so did their mobility.

After all, they were dead.

Once their hearts stopped pumping, the muscles eventually became burdens—accessories hanging on stiff and cumbersome bones. Not to say they were totally useless. They worked enough for them to slowly get around. They worked enough to force their jaws together over the flesh of the living—to tear, drink and infect.

They still had the drive in them. They still needed fresh meat.

Frank supposed their hunger was something autonomous to actual physiological brain function. Something ethereal, supernatural—spacey. Technically, the brain was dead, the stomach didn't need food, but the desire to feed lived on—an instinctual motivation lurking somewhere in the intangible fog of consciousness, like a vagrant hiding out in an abandoned building.

But no one knew for sure how the germ worked.

Unfortunately, Frank couldn't find anyone willing to sit down and divulge the scientific facts and varied nuances of zombie-ism. One extremely problematic factor in his quest for answers was that all the scientists (and rest of the world) had become zombies.

Eventually, he regarded the reanimation process as one might regard the existence of, say...the universe.

It just was. End of discussion.

As Frank closed the rear hatch of his 4 Runner over the almost definitely female corpse, six months into the pandemic, the dead, still pathetically continuing to amble about, looked more like your conventional zombie. Slow staggering, bipedal, rotting bags of disgustingness, slowly moving their creaking jaws at the sight of the living. They were no longer a threat unless you were ridiculously careless. You could easily stroll past a group of them and emerge unscathed.

He'd spent some time studying the effects of decomposition on the human body when on a whim, after a long day of "cleaning," he'd stopped by the library on his way home.

He knew that during the putrefaction stages, the bacteria that had been living in a person's intestine—happily co-existing in life—took on the rather barbaric practice of eating its host once all that annoying living had ceased. After a week dead, the bodies would begin to bloat—swelling with the released fluids of internal organs being consumed. This process caused gasses to emanate from any orifice available—like farting from every hole in your body, all at once.

Not pleasant but the smell was a good indicator that a zombie was near.

That, however, was back in the early days.

As time passed, the bodies of the dead advanced further in their decaying process, arriving at the butyric fermentation stage. When this occurred, usually after fifty days or so, the skin would begin to dry up and the bones would become hollow either because of cannibalistic bacteria or any number of insect larvae that made its cozy little home in the gross putrescence of death. This however, all depended on environmental factors—weather, temperature, etc.—not to mention, the scientists hadn't taken into account that these cadavers might still be up and moving around, which, in turn would slow the whole process even more as a minimal amount of blood would still be flowing though those dusty veins.

But when it came to muscles functioning to say, throw a rock or tackle a living human, it was not likely seeing as the cells had ceased aerobic respiration and were unable to generate energy molecules needed to maintain any type of normal muscle biochemistry. Not to mention, as the human machine stops working, gravity steps in to have some fun. It yanks anything it can pry loose down toward the feet, so the effect ends up looking like everyone is wearing huge, purple/black juice sacks around their ankles. This unfortunate phenomenon led to the ever-present stagger. Having your feet and legs filled with liquefied organ tissue and bacterial waste will tend to put an end to any quick-step routine. It would be like trying to walk with grocery bags full of Jell-o strapped to your feet.

Slow going.

They couldn't run, they couldn't attack. They were basically disintegrating on their feet, leaving chunks of viscous putrescence in their wake.

And Frank was there to clean up the mess.

Inexplicably, he seemed to be immune to the germ, but he didn't waste too much time ruminating on the reasons. All that mattered was, he was still alive. So, he cleaned, propelled onward by his OCD and inability to commit suicide which just seemed to be so fundamentally untidy.

He just needed to keep busy, keep moving.

After three months of crushing loneliness and his unfounded, ego-driven belief that he was probably the last living human on the planet, he'd settled into his routine.

It was boring but at least it was consistent and reliable.

What else does a person do on a planet all alone? Take up new hobbies? Write that book they'd been putting off? Paint a picture? Develop a vaccine in a dimly lit basement laboratory? Jerk off on hard nippled window mannequins at the local woman's boutique?

He hoped the answers were hidden somewhere in his hometown of Cheney, Washington, which was where he was currently residing.

Cheney was a small town—about eight thousand people at the last census—but now, it was Frank's whole world.

After moving to LA in the late nineties, working in the entertainment industry in varying capacities, falling in and out of love, developing a serious drinking problem, he'd come to terms with existence. They'd forged an agreement.

"I'll let you live," existence had said, "and you don't ask anymore fucking questions."

This was a fine arrangement for Frank. He was tired of trying to find meaning.

This little deal with existence came just after Frank had gotten out of prison for accidentally killing the host of the show he was producing.

It had been an accident... he kept telling himself.

After spending countless years bouncing from job to job working on undeniably terrible reality TV shows, Frank caught his break. A friend of a friend of a friend gave him a referral and he found himself producing a different undeniably terrible reality show for MTV, called Douchebags.

The show's premise was simple.

A group of mid-twenties idiots with no ambition or discernable talents were put in front of a camera and told to be themselves. That is to say, they would drink themselves into a stupor and dare each other to do dumb shit—usually resulting in someone getting seriously hurt. People ate it up like cocaine pizza... and overnight, Frank found himself the director of a hit show and drowning in so much money he couldn't spend it fast enough.

Suddenly, Frank was a Hollywood player, living the high life—and it was great. Sure, he had his moments of internal debate—telling himself he was sacrificing his convictions and integrity for cash. He knew the show was shit—everyone knew it. But then Frank would look down at the twenty-year-old bikini model whose name he didn't know, sucking his cock... and well... integrity, in-shmegrity.

The host of the show, Bill Bonzi, had a tendency to pull Frank on camera from time to time—getting him involved in some odd stunt. Frank would feign reluctance and eventually end up being the guy who lit the fuse or, pulled the trigger—as the case may be. In fact, it was the latter scenario that put an abrupt end to Frank's career.

The show was in its seventh season and the pranks and stunts were losing their luster. They had to keep pushing the envelope to keep the viewers interested. Seeing someone kicked in the nuts is only funny the first ten thousand times—after that you have to smash one of their nuts with a hammer.

And so, it went.

Bill Bonzi decided he wanted to get shot. It would be a controlled environment. They'd have cops, paramedics, weapon experts and all that on hand but when it came down to pulling the trigger, Bill insisted Frank do the honors.

By that point, Frank hated Bill with a fiery passion. He still liked the fame and money—but hated Bill.

Frank had everything set up for him—a rifle carefully aimed at Bill's thigh—set up on a stand and sighted by an expert marksman. All Frank had to do was step in and pull the trigger.

He told the courts he didn't remember nudging the stock as he'd stepped up to the gun, though there was a part of him—a place deep down—that knew the exact moment when his elbow bumped the gun. The bullet, meant for the meat of Bill's tattooed thigh found purchase in Bill's right eyeball instead and continued out the back of the skull, spraying brain matter and bright red gore on the white studio wall.

As a deathly silence fell over the cast and crew, Frank had a moment when he actually found himself fascinated that there had been brains in that seemingly empty head.

The footage never aired of course, but somehow (to someone's great financial gain) the clip ended up leaking to the news stations and eventually found its way, unedited, online to the delight of pimply faced teens with a death-fetish.

And thus, Frank's career as a celebrity producer, was over.

He was charged with second degree murder—involuntary manslaughter.

The charge didn't stick long. Frank was rich and had plenty of high-powered lawyers to grease the courts, eventually getting the charge reduced to some kind of misdemeanor, gross negligence, or something.

By that point, Frank wasn't paying much attention.

His time in the limelight ended as abruptly as it had begun.

There was still the residual celebrity status of being the guy who killed an American icon but even then, the models sucking his cock were getting less and less attractive. Eventually, it was only the "plus-size" models who showed interest and finally... no models at all.

Eventually, the only people interested in him were those wanting to drag him deeper into the muck.

Just after the Access Hollywood special cleverly titled, "The Real Life Kill Bill," had received record Neilson ratings, Frank decided it was time to get out.

Once he completed his community service and counseling sessions, he decided to call it quits in Hollywood and moved back home.

Cheney. Eastern Washington. Rural, conservative and perpetually stuck a decade in the past.

There, Frank enjoyed virtual anonymity.

The people in Cheney were either too old to care about pop cultural phenoms or too young to be concerned with yesterday's news. All the people in between were just small-town idiots, in Frank's mind, so the minimal amount of jeering and sniggering were insignificant. Tolerable, at least. No one was throwing their 12-dollar smoothies at him at stop lights. He was no longer getting turned away from swank Hollywood parties. He could walk down the street without being the target of shouted death threats from passing Bentley's and blacked-out town cars.

Life was better in Cheney.

Slow, to be sure, but at that point in Frank's life, the slower things were, the better.

He just had no idea just how slow they would get.