"Was that a gunshot?" Frank asked Sgt. Gacy as they sat in the warmly lit Processing tent.

"Sounded like it," the man said not looking up from his paperwork.

"Should... uh... someone go check it out?"

"Not your concern," Gacy droned. He was a rotund man with a square head, close-cropped hair and a push-broom moustache. "So, based on the information we've gathered so far it appears that you were somehow in league with the female zombie. The one in the bikini, is that true?"

Frank looked over at Emily and Tristen sitting on the other side of the tent with their backs to him, getting interrogated by their own fat soldiers. He looked back to Gacy. "I don't know about, in league. We were travelling together."

"Um hm. And why didn't she attack you?" Gacy asked scratching some notes.

"She's... um. Well, I don't know exactly. She's different than the others. She was frozen for the first few months of this whole catastrophe and didn't, you know... rot. She seems a whole lot more... together than the other zombies. Physically and mentally."

Gacy continued to write on his papers, his moustache bristling. "Frozen, you say."

"Speaking of Jane, is she okay?" Frank continued. "I heard one of the other soldiers mention something about the bikini girl."

"She's dead," Gacy said, not looking up.

"What?" Frank blurted, suddenly awash in horror.

"She's a zombie. She's dead. Why do you care if she's okay?"

"Oh. Jesus. I thought..."

Gacy looked up to Frank's eyes. Studying them. "You fucking her or something?"

"What? No!"

"You're still alive so that'd be necrophilia, you know."

"I'm not... sleeping with her. She's just... she's nice. A friend. I just wanted to know what's going to happen to her. I can't imagine you guys would let the zombies and living mingle in your little camp here. So, what's the plan for her? Am I able to see her again?"

"Not sure that's in the cards, champ. She's infected—possibly with the variant—and needs to be under close supervision."

"B.4?"

"Before what?" Gacy had gone back to looking at his notes.

"No... the letter B-point-4."

"The variant. That's right. And if that's the case, it'll make all the difference in the world. We're on the precipice of something big here," Gacy said, letting his non-dominant hand drift down to his belly which he scratched unabashedly.

"Like what? A vaccine?"

"Not quite." His smile was not comforting. "This could be the dawn of something entirely new."

"Wait... what do you mean? If not a cure... what would you do with her? Is she going to be okay?" Frank—like Jane—was getting fed up with all the veiled nonsense and arcane answers. Maybe Emily had been right. Maybe these guys were not to be trusted. It was all just smoke and mirrors.

Gacy leaned back in his folding chair, which creaked loudly under his bulk and touched his pen to his lower lip, looking pensive. He sat forward, squinting at Frank.

"What?" Frank asked, suspiciously.

"When you fucked her, did you jizz in her?"

"What?!"

"Did you blow in her? Cum. Did you shoot your wad inside her vagina?"

"No! We..."

"Shot in her hair, huh? Or on the face?"

"No!"

"On the tits then. That makes sense. She looks like a goddamn swimsuit model with that perfect cleavage and that flat stomach—legs like a goddamn stork. Think that's where I would have put it. The tits. You know... if it was just for fun."

"Jesus, what are you talking about?"

"So, did not ejaculate in subject..." Gacy said as he wrote.

"I'm a little confused by this line of questioning," Frank said nervously straightening the papers and pens on the table then sitting up straighter in his chair, feeling the creeping presence of a threat. "I never had sex with Jane. At all. We're just... friends. And, no offence, but these types of questions don't seem... like standard procedure. They're a little... invasive."

"Yep. Okay, you're done." Gacy looked over his shoulder at another guard standing near the tent flap. "You can take him to the barn."

"The barn? What's the barn?"

"He's useless," Gacy continued talking to the guard. "Just get him penned up and we'll save him for later."

"What's that now?" Frank asked, trying to decipher the words he'd just heard.

"Yes sir," said the guard.

Frank was roughly pulled from his chair, looking back to Tristen and Emily who were too preoccupied to notice. Dazed and unable to process what was happening, he allowed himself to be led out of the tent just in time to see Jane being led into the Medical trailer just 50 yards away.

"Jane!" he yelled and immediately caught the butt of the guard's rifle in the back of his head. The stadium lighting flickered off and on in his eyes as he fell to his knees. Goddamn, always with the head, he thought for the millionth time.

"Frank!" he heard Jane in the distance, echoic and slightly modulated like a low voice on a scratchy radio.

He shook his head and looked to where he'd seen her, but she'd already been taken inside the trailer.

"Get the fuck up, breather," the guard said.

"Breather?"

"Get up," the man grabbed Frank by the armpit and yanked.

"Breather?" Frank said again. "You're a fucking zombie!"

The next second, the guard's rifle was pointed at Frank's nose. He could smell the gun oil and bitter tang of metal.

"Call me that again!" The guard said, looking entirely unstable.

Frank was assembling the pieces in his mind but didn't say another word. He'd been seeing small clues and reading foggy signals since he'd first met these "military" men. Something had been off since the get go. Now it was starting to make sense.

These guys weren't military. These were zombies. B.4 zombies. The new breed. They were nearly indistinguishable from the living. Nothing looked suspect in their appearance.

Just then, Dahmer briskly walked up to the guard through the hard shadows. "Bundy, what's the situation here? Lower your weapon."

"Fuck that, Ben, he knows."

Dahmer looked at Frank for a long moment and finally let out a defeated breath. He pulled out his folding knife, extended it and poked a little hole in the palm of his hand. No blood. "Secrets out," he said, showing Frank the dry wound.

"Dahmer? Bundy? And that guy in the tent? Sargent Gacy," Frank said. "Fucking clever. You are psychopaths."

"Look. I'm sure you're confused," Dahmer began in a mollifying voice, "but I assure you, what we're doing here is of the utmost importance." Contrary to the madness of the revelation, he sounded sincere.

"Are you even in the army?" Frank spat out.

"No... I mean, some of the men were at one point. Actually, a few of them are still, I guess... so much as there is an army anymore." He looked at the ground then at Bundy and gave the slightest of nods. Bundy lowered his gun.

"So, the situation goes like this, a bunch of us were out in Colorado, surviving, doing our best to outlive this whole thing and made our way here, intending to get to the coast. We'd heard there were some communities of people out there—organized strongholds. But when we got here, we discovered this temporary base—happened totally by accident. We were just looking for a place to camp and stumbled upon this place. It looked deserted, but you can't be too careful these days.

"We covered the grounds, putting down the odd straggler or two until we came to the medical trailer. It was completely surrounded by dead, rotten zombies in uniform. Some completely gone, some just piles of mush still trying to work their jaws. Something was still in the trailer. Turns out, a military doctor and a couple of corporals had barricaded themselves inside. Most of the other personnel had gotten the bug and over time they'd torn each other apart. The trailer has an airlock—a clean area, you know. Completely sealed off with HEPA filters in the vents and pumping in oxygen to give them safe air to breathe. The doctor was on the verge of discovery and couldn't risk losing all of his work.

"Through his research he ended up discovering the B.4 mutation while analyzing some of their frozen samples. Turns out, the freezing process was pivotal in the mutation. So, your girlfriend, the bikini girl..."

"Jane."

"Right, Jane. She... she's the first of her kind we've found out and about. She's unique and... essential to our mission."

"Your mission? What does that mean?"

"We're all B.4 now. See, once we found this place and locked it down—discovered the doctor—he'd been locked in that trailer for months and pretty much went crazy. He realized, the only way to keep going was to become a B.4 zombie. So, he infected himself and killed the corporals—kept their parts in the freezer like he was a pioneer preparing for a long winter."

"Or Jeffery Dahmer," Frank interjected.

"Right. That's... that's good. But the point is, the B.4 variant is actually pretty incredible. It's like becoming a superhero. You don't need water, you don't need sleep, you don't experience fatigue—we're basically the first species that could for all intents and purposes, claim immortality."

"But you need brains," Frank interjected.

"Yes. We need to eat. And once someone turns, they're incredibly aggressive. We learned that the hard way. But the doctor figured out if you injected their meals with a certain hormone, they'd calm down a bit—be able to think clearly rather than go all apeshit and start biting anything that moved. It's estrogen actually. Bovine estrogen. Keeps you feeling even keeled—and fortunately didn't result in all of us just growing huge lactating tits."

"Man boobs," Frank said.

"Right. So, we inject our meals with bovine estrogen which not only keeps us from going loony toons but makes the meat taste less gamey. Win, win."

"That's all well and good," Franks started, "but what do you need with Jane. She's dead already. You can't eat her."

"No. That's where you and the other two come in."

"Excuse me?"

"You're the meat," Dahmer said, "and she's the matriarch."

Dahmer looked at Frank's blank expression. "Look son, I don't know if you've noticed, but there's a distinct lack of women around here. Which, as I'm sure you could imagine, greatly limits our ability to... proceed."

Frank quickly pictured a scenario in which he attacked Bundy to get his gun. He wondered how far the skirmish would get before Dahmer put a round in his brain. His chances didn't look good. He opted to keep the conversation going—try to accrue more information.

"So, you're going to fuck Jane and eat Emily, Tristen and I?" Frank blurted.

"That about sums it up." Bundy returned, sneering.

"But how do you know if you can procreate with a zombie?"

"We don't," Dahmer shrugged. "But it's worth a shot. If we can get her pregnant, we might be able to keep our population going. Over time, increase our numbers. We can travel out further—find more of our kind and begin to rebuild. Start the world over. This is the genesis of something huge. A new dominant species. Say hello to the top of the food chain."

"But that's just it. After time...what would you do for food?"

"We'd keep harvesting humans," Dahmer said, simply.

"Keep?"

"You'll see."

With Dahmer's exposition wrapped up, Bundy gruffly led Frank to a separate holding facility, pushing him forward with the barrel of his rifle. The barn. A huge red barn lit by colossal flood lights—which looked totally out of place amidst all the military structures, vehicles and tents. There were several armed guards stationed around the building. One of them slid back the enormous door as Dahmer, Bundy and Frank approached.

The interior of the barn had gone through a serious upgrade. The whole building was lit with cold fluorescents. Where there used to be horse stalls were now solidly constructed cells. Cages.

Cages full of people.

Living people. About 30 of them. Men and women of all ages.

On the interior perimeter of the building, the men had set up what appeared to be a makeshift slaughterhouse. There were corrals inhabited with shackled people, bound at the wrists and loosely chained at the ankles. They were all gagged with dirty rags and duct tape. When the doors had opened, a few of them looked around, catching Frank's eye. They looked... done—surrendered to their fate. There was no glimmer of hope left in their eyes.

After a second or two, they turned away and resumed their journey into oblivion.

"They're pretty sedated so don't expect any fanfare," Dahmer said.

"But there are women here," Frank said motioning with his hands, which Bundy immediately grabbed and held together as he slid on the tactical zip-tie cuffs and pulled them tight.

"True." Dahmer nodded.

"Why don't you just infect them for breeding?"

"We've tried." He smiled wickedly. "Believe me, we've tried. Time and time again. But once they're infected, they're just too aggressive and the hormone injections just make them crazier. Women, right? They're crazy to begin with but when you give them an extra dose of lady juice, they totally lose their shit. They are... not fun to deal with. None of the women who've been given B.4 have lasted longer than a few days before we had to put them down so the idea of taking a pregnancy to term is...unlikely. That's why your Jane friend is of such interest to us. She seems pretty even-keeled, docile even."

Frank couldn't help but think of the times Jane was anything but docile. Like when she'd kicked him in the nuts, punched him, or went on a rampage at the Center, killing the zombie doctors or losing her shit back at the Fill and Feed.

"What about the doctor? The one who discovered B.4 and the hormone thing? Isn't there something he can figure out?"

"We'll never know. He turned out to be an asshole, dosed us with the variant telling us it was a vaccine. That's how we became B.4. Turned out to be a vaccine for living." He chuckled. "So, we were forced to end his suffering."

At the word suffering, Frank heard a muffled scream coming from the slaughterhouse area. A man had been laid out on a bloody table and a technician in an apron was deftly filleting the man's leg. Blood poured forth liberally, splashing into a basin under the table.

"The meat's best when it's fresh—pumped full of adrenaline," Dahmer grinned. "The pain is essential—floods the tissue—makes it taste like magic." He smacked his lips a little, then pointed under the table. "We pack the blood in old IV bags and freeze them just in case we ever get low on our meat supply."

Jane's blood bags. Turns out, she was on the right track.

"Why are you telling me all this?"

"Convenient plot device."

"True dat," Bundy said with a nod.

"Jesus, this is barbaric," Frank whispered.

"Not really. It's just a necessary part of the process."

"But these are people. Living, breathing people! Like you once were! And you're treating them like... cattle." Frank had to raise his voice to contend with the agonized moans of the man getting sliced up on the table.

"They are cattle—even without the cow hormones. We're all just livestock—plodding along aimlessly until we die and are consumed by the earth. Not to get too philosophical, but really, what purpose do humans serve? Sure, they bagged our groceries or fixed our cars, but they weren't helping the species in any real substantial way. Humans have had their run. If anything, they were a cancer. Just slowly killing the planet.

"But now... the B.4 generation can actually put them to good use. They'll be able to actively participate in something meaningful. They'll be the sustenance fueling the rebirth of civilization."

"Do you really picture you and the other B.4 zombies repopulating the planet and starting from scratch? That seems like a pretty lofty goal."

"Well... what else are we gonna do?" Dahmer shrugged again.

Frank thought for a second. "Touché," he said.

"Anyhoo..." Dahmer began, "So, welcome to your new very temporary home." He slapped Frank on the back. "It won't be long before your nothing more than scraps in my stool."

"Jesus Ben," said Bundy, making a stink-face.

"Facts of life," he said, turning back to the open barn door. "And death."