In the past six months he figured he'd re-killed upward of 400 people. He occasionally scolded himself for losing count but some of them just unavoidably bled together. There were times when he couldn't be certain how many actually truly expired and how many were just horribly maimed. There were the ones he'd hit with the 4 Runner, for example. He couldn't be sure their brains had been destroyed.

That seemed to be the only absolute when it came to zombies. Annihilate the hunger source and you'd annihilate the hungry. The movies had been right about that. Instructional even. They were like college-prep courses giving you the tools to succeed in a world no one would have thought possible.

He missed going to the movies but managed to build a relatively robust movie collection while he was out and about. The Cheney Safeway had a DVD section near the front which he'd pretty much emptied out. Lately, however, his library was being overrun by porn but still, he kept some of the greats close at hand for rainy nights and those unshakeable bouts of depression or nostalgia.

But mostly, it was the porn.

There'd been a sketchy convenient store on the way out of town that had constructed a small clapboard room (more of a closet) to house a wealth of adult entertainment. The room had swinging doors like in western saloons and sometimes, when he was a kid, if he timed it right, he'd catch a glimpse of those glossy boxes when a sweaty man exited the room following his ducked head, making a beeline for the cashier.

There was so much sex in that little room.

After the initial stress of the outbreak—after he'd started cleaning and found himself bored senseless in the evenings, he'd made it a regular practice to visit the store a few times a week to pick out new titles. For some inexplicable reason, he couldn't bring himself to grab all of them at once—he had to space it out. Even though no one was watching, he still felt a gnawing, nebulous guilt about the situation.

Plus, it was enjoyable for him to act surprised at finding a movie he may have missed before.

"Asstastic 16? I don't remember seeing this," he'd say aloud just on the off chance a phantom ear could hear and confirm that he was still a novice porn aficionado.

The held over puritanical guilt of a conservative American society still scratched away at his moral being. It didn't matter that the rest of the world was dead; Frank knew it was fundamentally wrong to masturbate. Sex and nudity were bad. Seeing thousands of Middle Eastern refugees murdered in the crossfire of some dick-measuring war on the news was just fine. But seeing a nipple... unacceptable.

He still had needs. But what else could he do—apart from engaging in necrophilia, which could have proven life threatening if one was to miscalculate a given opportunity.

Not to say the thought hadn't arisen, poked through the gossamer haze of a relaxed consciousness to say, Hey Frank. You know, fucking a corpse is probably okay. I mean, whose gonna know?

Well, he knew he'd know and that was enough to stay away.

Bestiality was another one of those no-fucking-way situations.

As stigmatizing as it may have been, jerking it was the way of the world. Always had been. Always would be.

Even as he drove home, after the attack, rubbing his gouged eye, he wondered which porn he'd watch. It had become the highlight of any given day. Just the way some of them were shot (low resolution, no discernable production value, home video style) kept him closer to the memory of real human interaction.

Even if it was like spying on people... it was people he was spying on. Living people. That was enough to curb the crushing insanity of loneliness—or at least dull it for a while.

That and cumming.

He checked over his shoulder, scanning the backseat, to see if he was forgetting anything. He'd picked up some more nails, two cans of gas, and a stack of magazines. The magazines were of the Hollywood gossip sort. A guilty pleasure, but much like the porn, it made things feel a bit more real. Worshipping at the altar of celebrity had always been a great way to avoid the tragic recognition of a hopelessly ordinary life.

Now, with the world crumbling around him, ordinary was a completely unattainable goal. But still, he struggled as hard as possible to create a façade of ordinary. He strived for the mundane.

His eye still hurt but he could see well enough to plow through a few monsters and maintain his course. He'd clean them up later.

Frank wondered for a second if the sense of soothing satisfaction he experienced each time he heard those fragile bones snapping under the tires was him getting used to this new life... or him enjoying it.

Back in the beginning, he guiltily found himself reveling in the chaos. Everyone had fanaticized about living through a zombie apocalypse. All those movies had made it look fun to kill zombies and live in a world where suddenly, the rules of society were void. It painted a picture of chaotic, rambunctious freedom—with guns.

It sounded great.

But after a few weeks he thought of it like someone sitting indoors on a rainy day, wishing the sky would clear, then secretly admonishing themselves, overcome with a cloying disappointment, when the sun burned away the clouds. It was like planning an elaborate military attack only to have the enemy surrender.

He missed the fight, and he missed the rain—the horrible time-suck of everyday life. Waiting at crosswalks, getting coffee and flirting with the barista, saying "hey" to the guy at 7-11 who knew what kind of smokes he wanted even before he asked. He wanted the traffic back—the telemarketing calls, the bills, the struggle to be fashionable. Everything he'd wanted to get rid of was gone and in its wake, left the cold emptiness of a dream come true.

Getting your wish was never as good as wanting it.

In fact, there were times he wished he'd stayed in LA.

He found himself missing the bitter taste in the air, the ubiquitous haze—the hyper convenience of everything. But once he'd come home and sunk into the comforting morass of virtual anonymity, he knew there was no turning back. Being blacklisted was one thing but having everyone actively hating you was absolutely intolerable.

He didn't have a job, wasn't married and had no girlfriend so severing ties was easy. He just packed up his car one day and left.

Not that living at home in Cheney had necessarily been all that comfortable. Familiar is a better word.

His childhood had been one marked by total neglect. That is to say, his parents, being of the hippie generation and clinging with patchouli reeking fingers to the edge of their dying idealism, chose to equate parenting to owning a cactus.

You didn't really have to do anything.

And that is just what they did.

His relationship with his parents was akin to sharing a house with newly acquainted roommates. They'd nod at each other as they passed in the living room or share a half-hearted pleasantry before quietly berating each other for leaving only a sip of milk in the carton or not providing any kind of meaningful guidance in life —but beyond that, there was nothing.

So, at the tender age of 30, after being ostracized from the Hollywood crowd, he inadvertently found himself focusing on that grinding emptiness he's always had his gut. A place that should have been filled by parental love. He'd never established any kind of real bond with those tree-hugging, do-nothings, so, he figured he'd head home, settle in for a few months and potentially get to know them—if they were interested.

As it turned out, he never got a chance to establish a connection as shortly after his arrival, the germ started making its rounds.

When his dad turned, he split his skull in half with a shovel, cleaving his face right down the middle. His mom followed suit shortly after, receiving a screwdriver through the eye.

Once his parents were dead, he had to admit he felt very little. He did, however, take a moment to thank them. By not representing anything truly important in his life, they had spared him the pain of loss. The shallow graves in the backyard, adorned with wilted potted plants he'd taken from the kitchen windowsill represented the extent of his respect for these estranged people.

The passing of his parents wasn't nearly as hard as being in his childhood home. It still carried the ghosts of his adolescence. He'd spent nearly 19 years in that house learning to be distant, cynical and reclusive. Without the distraction of loathing his insipid parents, the house felt profoundly hollow.

He stayed there for a few more weeks, locked in, cleaning out the pantry and brooding like he was reliving his teenage years, before his very persistent suicidal thoughts forced him outside.

There was a lot of that at the beginning.

Suicide.

People who had survived the first wave or had found themselves immune to the disease were overcome by the hopelessness of it all and often looked for peace down the barrel of a soon to be discharged rifle or at the end of a noose or bottom of a pill-bottle.

Frank would feel sort of sad every time he'd find a zombie hanging from a light fixture by its elongated, bruised purple neck, struggling and growling at him as he searched their kitchen for food. Also, it was not uncommon to find your undead attacker slashed from wrist to elbow by the snaking trail of a razor. It was only the ones who'd put a bullet through their brains that didn't come back.

The lucky ones.

It was on one of his excursions out of the house that Frank had met Dylan and Katie (his eventual roommates) cowering behind the counter of a local pharmacy. They'd heard him approaching, his Converse crunching on the broken glass and miscellaneous wreckage. He was on a mission to find painkillers. Not because he was in any physical pain but because life was pain, and any anodyne was a welcome addition to his generous alcohol intake.

Dylan and Katie were looking for antibiotics—thinking ahead, in case one of them were to get injured. It was a smart move—one that Frank had not even considered. He was ridiculously drunk as he stumbled through the store, mumbling to himself and acting not entirely un-zombie-like—moaning, drooling and unsteady on his feet.

Hence Dylan and Katie's hiding.

Once Dylan realized Frank was in fact just an incredibly drunk living human and only posed a threat to his own liver, he emerged from behind the counter. Dylan held up one hand to show he was unarmed. His other hand was holding Katie tightly against his chest. Frank shook his head hard to make sure he wasn't imagining the shaved-headed, rugged, tattooed man clutching a terrified, fragile and bright-eyed little child. Turned out they were real.

Three months after that, they were dead, and Frank was alone. So, he continued taking residency at their house out there on the edge of town. Even with death tainting the walls and crusty black blood still caked into the carpet, Frank remained. It was better than the intangible horrors he'd endured at Chez Peace and Love—his childhood home.

It was better at Dylan's house. Homier. It felt like people had really lived there. Not just existed. His actual house was nothing more than a monument to lethargy and sedation. There was nothing left there for him. At least at the house on the edge of town, there were the whispers of life still echoing through the halls. And though he had spent most of his 30 years distancing himself from people, he was not immune to needing their company. He'd often battled with a cavernous hole he felt expanding in his gut. A gnawing thing of incalculable torment devouring him from the inside out. Loneliness. So being around other people was a welcome distraction.

But now, all he had left was gossip mags and porno.

A paltry substitute for companionship.