The last time I saw Creek, his head was getting chewed off by a zombie.

Well, “zombie” is what we called them, but we don’t really know what they were. They didn’t stumble around with their hands out in front of them, moaning and bitching for brains and shit. That was just something out of George Romero. These fuckers were fast. They moved all weird, real quick and jerky, cutting these angles with their arms and legs that I never seen cut on another person. They’d come out of nowhere, zombie spit flying, their arms whipping around like broken propellers, grunting and hissing, all that monster shit. And they were smart. Not smart enough to open doors or climb fences, thank God, but smart enough to move in packs and hunt their prey like the raptors in Jurassic Park. You could look out from behind the blockade we set up at the gate almost anytime of day and see nothing but street and overgrown grass. Then some cat would wander by, just minding its own ass, and bam! They’d smell something living, hear something rattling around, and they’d be everywhere all of a sudden, organized, zombie boot camp maneuvers, twisting their little heads up and around, sniffing the air, growling. That cat would be dead before it could rear up to claw a thing.

You wouldn’t fare any better as person.

I was convinced they were people once. They still looked like people, arms, legs, faces. Sure, they were the wrong color, and their skin was fucked up and wrong, and every single one was naked as the day they were born, but the fundamentals were there. They had to be people once.

Jo thought different.  She thought they were something else, something supernatural, something alien. No matter how many of them crowded near the fences around the trailer park, none of us ever saw one we recognized under the gray-green skin and the sores, the pus and the rot. Jo said we should.

“If they were people, they had to be our people. Olympus people.” She said this to me one night while we were laying in the hammock. “They locked us in with ‘em the second they got here. You know that. If they were our people, we’d see it in their faces when they come up to the fence.”

“Maybe they’re from out of town.”

“They’re zombies, Eddie.” It was dark, but I could tell she was rolling her eyes at me. “They don’t get in the car and drive down to Florida. And the quarantine...”

“They walk… maybe.”

Jo didn’t say anything. She just took a long drag on her cigarette. “The ones of us they kill. We don’t see ‘em anymore.” She let that linger for a while. “If Layon were here, he’d know what to do.”

So, Creek had just gotten back from the Oracle, and he’d made it safe inside the wall. He was still in the holding pen, trying to shove open the door of the Corvette. The zombies had done a number on the car. There were dents all over it, deep ones, like craters, with blood and hair stuck to some of them. The rear fender had been torn off, and the trunk was popped. It looked like someone had taken a hundred baseball bats to it. The front window had a crack that cut clean across it, and the back passenger side window had been blown out completely. The front driver’s side tire was blown clean off. Creek drove the Corvette back on nothing but the rim.

Stinger and I were at the inside fence. The others were all in their trailers. Even Jo. Just to be safe.

“You a zombie, Creek?” I yelled into the pen.

“Like he’d fucking answer if he was.” Stinger disarmed the safety on his shotgun. “Just push the fucking gate shut.”

The driver’s side door swung open with a loud clang. The door was dented real bad near the handle, so Creek had to kick it open. Stinger lifted the shotgun and aimed it at the open door while I heaved my whole weight against the trailer park’s main gate. It was weird that Stinger wasn’t having to shoot zombies chasing after the Corvette to get inside the park. I was able to get the gate shut and locked off without a single one trying to get in.

“I’m good, Stinger. I’m good.” Creek’s voice came from inside the car.

“Password, dumbass.” Stinger didn’t drop the shotgun.

“Stormy Daniels. Can I come out?”

“Slow. You know the drill.”

Creek’s hands were first, peeking out over the open door, raised like he was getting arrested. He had a lot of blood on them -- this was something to worry about -- and he was missing his pinky on his right hand. His feet hit the ground, sneakers covered in mud, and with a grunt he lifted himself out of the car so he was standing, arms still raised, looking like hell.

“It’s bad.” There was worry in Creek’s voice.

“What happened to your finger?” Stinger’s voice was tight.

“It ain’t a bite!” Creek dug his left hand in his shirt pocket, keeping the other one held up, so Stinger could see. “I slammed it in the door trying to get the fuck out there/ Snapped it clean off.” He fished out a purple bloody cocktail sausage that used to be his pinky.

“You want me to let him in?” I had my hand on the inside door’s crank.

“Don’t touch it, Ed.” The gun stayed leveled at Creek. “He’s covered in blood.”

“It’s them, Stinger. They’re gone. Like I told you. It’s bad.”

“What happened at The Oracle?”

I never heard Creek talk so fast and so much in my life. We were right about the power getting cut off at the Oracle. But we were wrong about the Crew; they weren’t the ones who did it. The zombies had done it. Six or seven of ‘em climbed the utility poles and chewed into the transformer -- the pop! and the fireworks from the night before -- knocking out power to the Oracle and the whole block around it.

“Kamikaze shit, Stinger! Where the fuck they learned that?” Creek’s voice was shaking. “Then they got in through the windows. The windows, Stinger. And I don’t mean they crashed through ‘em. They opened ‘em. Fucking opened ‘em.”

When Creek got to the Oracle, the place was full up with a swarm of them, gnawing and gnashing their disgusting jaws into the flesh of every survivor who’d been hiding out there. The whole of the Skeleton Crew. Margie and Piper and Delicious. Sloppy Hoppy. The couple of stragglers who made it out of the Chicken Hut Invasion alive. They were all in pieces.

“That’s why I’m covered.” Creek gestured down at the mess all over him. “I march in the door, they got blood flying everywhere. Like a fucking food processor. Every. Fucking. Where.”

And because Creek was only nineteen, and when you’re nineteen, you’re an idiot, when he marched in the door, he made a big fucking racket. So every zombie picking out pieces of people from their teeth turned their creepy undead heads up and decided that Creek looked like dessert.

“They were throwing themselves against the Corvette. I never saw ‘em do nothing like that.”

“They’re learning.” Stinger said this loud of enough for just me to hear. “We’re fucked.”

Stinger wasn’t wrong. Climbing was bad. If they could climb a utility pole, they could climb their way up our fortified walls and get into the trailer park. Opening windows was worse. Zombies are bad news, but zombies with hand-eye coordination are a disaster. And if they’re combining their new ninja skills with a kamikaze death wish, electrocuting themselves and cracking their skulls against cars going 80 miles an hour, we were fucked so hard, we were gonna have trouble walking in the morning.

“But Layon’s out, right?” Jo’s voice was suddenly behind us.

“Get back in the trailer, Jo. We ain’t cleared the park yet. And did you go see Layon, Creek? I told you —“

“I told him to go.” Jo walked up to the fence of the holding pen. “He’s my brother. Family business. So, he’s out right? Where’s Layon going?”

“He’s dead, Jo.”

Jo’s face didn’t move. Not an inch.

“Fucking zombies,” Stinger said.

“Not zombies.” Creek’s voice got quiet. He looked right at Jo. “Someone killed him. Bullet in his head.”

The news hit Jo so hard, I heard her knees buckle beneath her. I rushed over to catch her, and Creek lunged toward the fence.

“Get the fuck back, Creek!” Stinger’s gun was still trained at a point between Creek’s eyes.

Creek was going to say something -- maybe to tell Stinger to shut the hell up, maybe to comfort Jo over the news that Layon was dead -- but before the sounds in his throat could belch up through his mouth, the zombie baby shot up in the air and over the wall.

They threw a zom-baby over our wall. I watched it arch through the air, like a football perfectly passed, spinning in space, its fat little baby fingers grabbing at the air, its tiny baby mouth foaming with a green-gray slobber. I can’t believe they threw a zom-baby over our wall.  It was making this noise somewhere between cooing and growling, and it landed, with perfect precision, on the top of Creek’s head.

He didn’t have time to think. His arms didn’t have to time bat the little fucker off. The zom-baby dug its ugly teeth into his neck and started chomping away. Creek started screaming and tumbling backwards into the holding pen, grabbing at the zom-baby, blood spraying everywhere. The grabbing was useless. The baby was working fast, and in just ten seconds or so, had chewed halfway through his neck.

“Kill it, Stinger!” Jo was yelling at the top of her lungs. ‘Kill the fucking thing before his head’s come off!”

I could see in that moment the choice Stinger was gonna have to make. The zom-baby was in deep; his head was partially chewed down into Creek’s neck. If he was gonna do this in one shot, it wasn’t gonna be pretty.

“Close your eyes, Jo.” Stinger’s instruction was calm.

The shot from his shotgun took Creek’s head off, but the zom-baby’s head was obliterated into mush. They collapsed into a pile of human stuff and zombie stuff, mixing together in a red-gray gloop.

It was a lot to take in. Stinger lowered the shotgun.

“We aren’t safe no more.”

That was a fucking understatement.