I’m gonna go ahead and skip most of the survival part of my story. It’s really not that interesting, since I don’t “survive” long anyway. The most interesting bit is what happened right after the Zombie Diner.

I drove my shiny black car as long as I could, blinking back tears of fear and shock in increasing terror, dodging traffic and flying bodies, but within an hour the roads were just plain blocked. Cars had crashed, been abandoned, etc., and left to rot right where they stopped. I’d headed for the mountains and managed to get close to the west part of the city before I had to stop driving. I stayed frozen in place for a while, doors locked, but it was getting bad out there. There were more people than not bleeding and panicking, or otherwise chasing and attacking people, and the few healthy humans in sight banged on my windows and doors like a drowning person before getting caught by who or whatever was pursuing them.

I curled up in the seat cradling my head in my hands, utterly terrified. The sound of shattering glass and hollering made me bold upright, screaming. A big guy, terror in his eyes, had broken my window with a rock in his hand, and was trying to grab me for god-knows-what reason, hollering his lungs out. Screaming, I scurried across the passenger seat and out the other side door to find myself completely exposed in a mob of panic.

People were running everywhere. I clutched my machete with every ounce of strength I had. Later that night, it took me a full five minutes to pry each finger off of it. My muscles had clamped into place.

A sick woman with a bite mark on her arm and a shovel in her hands locked bloody eyes with me. She opened her mouth to scream and a mouthful of blood slid down her chin. I swear I peed myself.

I remember running, swinging my machete and screaming one long, animalistic scream.

I remember streams of blood flying off the end of my weapon, tripping over bodies lying in my path.

Hunching behind a wall, bolting again when I heard footsteps.

I remember running, and running, away from the screams, for miles uphill until my sobs felt like they were choking me, concrete and rock and landscaping under my feet. I remember climbing a gate on a driveway like it was nothing, barely feeling the scrapes and bruises, and hacking a couple of bodies that climbed after me. Kicking my way into a house and feeling the air conditioning hit my wet face. Slipping on a cool tile floor with my muddy shoes, bouncing off drywall, slamming a door behind me. I was in a small living room with doors leading in and out, and it was empty of people except for me.

I remember using my last strength to move a sofa and cabinet into place to block the doors, and collapsing on the floor. I must have passed out for a while, and thank whatever deity still exists outside people’s minds that nobody broke the window while I was out. It must have been, I reasoned later, because the ground sloped away from the front of the house and the window was up past eye level. When I came to, it was pitch black, I was still gripping my machete with both hands, and my body was a wreck of scratches, bruises, pulled muscles, and exhaustion. But the screams seemed farther away.

The house I’d first barricaded myself into was actually a gorgeous mansion in a ritzy suburb on Cheyenne Mountain. It was built right into the side of the cliff, and was the kind of house I imagined Leo DiCaprio had. I even pretended it was his, since all the belongings inside were for a man.

I’d driven and then run far enough up the mountain that zombies were fewer and farther between. Most people like the ones that lived here had been at work, at restaurants, or otherwise busy and away from home when the zombie plague hit. This was the rich neighborhood, with bigger houses, more acreage, built on rock foundations and overlooking the rest of the city. I was pleased with this house, built against the side of a cliff, and made it my temporary hideout. The owners never came back.

I barricaded the top floor, which had a gorgeous rooftop patio, and I enjoyed the amenities until they ran out. I showered until the water stopped, watched TV, which was nothing but disheveled anchors who were clearly living in the studio and speculating about how widespread the plague was, until there weren’t any channels left. Some announced that broadcasts were ending, some just stopped altogether and I wondered if the zombie outbreak had overrun the news buildings too.

When I got ragingly thirsty and had eaten everything in the house, I made a few shaky forays around the neighborhood. I found well-stocked cabinets and not much zombie resistance. I was surprised that I didn’t find any other pockets of healthy humans. They must be hiding just like I had been, or they didn’t exist.

Sniping zombies was also fun for a while. This town, despite somewhat liberal in the city limits, was pretty ripe with personal firearms sitting in country homes. People used to get on board with stricter gun laws to deter criminals from having guns, but darned if they were gonna get caught unarmed when shit went down. The personal weapons were relatively unsecured, on tops of dressers and cabinets, under mattresses, in holsters by the bed, in unlocked safes. Many of them were loaded or at least could easily be matched to boxes of ammo nearby. Not to mention a lot of the bodies I found had been packing. They’d undoubtedly grabbed their weapons and tried to battle it out instead of holing up in whatever concrete building they could find first.

Lots of good it did them, I thought, as I pried yet another semi-automatic from sticky, dead fingers.

The night the electricity went out was the most sobering. I was drinking my way through the stellar whiskey collection and playing with the sound system when everything went suddenly and utterly dark around 3 in the morning. My blood ran cold and everything was silent—I could hear the wind in the nearby trees and the drip of water from the rafters.

I’d anticipated the moment so i had candles lit in no time, but the warm little lights couldn’t dispel the icy dread that crawled up my skin. If the electricity was out—the most obvious vestiges of humanity’s hold on the planet, the one thing modern civilization has relied on the most—then we had definitely lost the battle with the plague. I knew it wasn’t the first time—plague and natural disasters have been wiping out whole cities, whole generations—hell, whole species—at once, basically forever. It’s a given. But in my short life of technological wonders, engineered genetics, preserved food, sterilized everything, it was physically impossible to imagine.

I sat there and the implications seeped into my consciousness one by one. Almost everyone I knew was probably dead. There might be other survivors besides me, but would it be better to band together, or worse? How long would it take before all the food was gone, and I’d have to figure out how to grow more? I slept a lot the next few days, overwhelmed and confused. I occasionally went to my rooftop, where I collected rainwater, sniped any zombies that wandered near, and tried to nurture an avocado plant I’d found inside.

Between finding guns and ammo, any bloody-eyed freaks who tried to get up close and personal were dispatched with an axe I’d found in the garage. The first one or two scared the shit out of me. Despite my badassery with petty crime and soft drugs in school, it took a minute to get used to hacking a wailing humanoid in the brain stem. After a couple though, I realized they were generally too stupid to hurt me, as long as I saw them coming. I had a few close encounters when I woke up, bleary-eyed, with howling and scratching outside my door. I’d hunker down with my weapon and wait for them to wander off.

If I had to leave my fortress, I wore multiple layers of clothing to protect from bites and scratches. For food, I scavenged nearby buildings, but I didn’t encounter healthy humans anywhere. There was only me, getting hungrier and angrier, nailing boards over my door for protection as my body detoxed from the 21st century. I was too scared to even sleep for long, or get too drunk. Being incapacitated or unconscious meant being unable to defend myself, and if it was possible, the zombies were getting hungrier and angrier than I was.

No, the survival was fairly easy at first. Like I said before, it mostly came naturally to me. It’s the long-term that eventually gets you. The monotony of merely surviving. One day after another and the same shit to do, same things to eat, only one face to see—yours, in the mirror, getting more and more eyebrow-y.

So here’s where there’s an important turn of events—right when I was starting to lose my shit a little bit. It wasn’t the dead bodies, the gore, the sheer terror of being hunted by other humans that finally undid me.

It was getting too horny.

I’d been playing this game with myself where I thought of every death in every horror movie I’d ever seen, every thriller, and dissected the situation to figure out which basic need the victim had given in to that lead to their demise. It was usually curiosity, or the urge to help a friend or lover (always capitally punished in movies), or letting your guard down while you take a dump, or—best of all—completely losing your cool and charging headfirst into mortal danger, screaming your head off.

I scoffed at all of these. I’d kept my cool pretty well, all things considered. I’d been smart. I hadn’t investigated weird noises in my underwear. I’d managed to safely feed and water myself and not give in to despair or grief over humanity’s demise. I was pretty proud of myself.

But in the middle of all this, a terrifying idea crept in that i couldn’t banish. If I was all alone in the world, I’d never get to have sex again. You’d think that would be the least of my worries, but the relative safety of my hideout led to maddening boredom after a while. I didn’t know how to grow food or build cleverly-engineered water purifying devices or even work a radio, and the all-knowing internet didn’t exist anymore. Besides my scavenging, I couldn’t improve my situation any more than I had, so my days began to stretch out indefinitely, and each the same.

I fantasized about the experiences I’d had, but there was no porn to watch. Human’s pesky habit of streaming everything online had led to a very sorry deficit of tangible spank material. I thought about people I’d crushed on in high school and people I’d used without a single spark of feeling. But nothing compared to the real deal.

And to be honest, I couldn’t stop thinking about Henry. Surely he had been more than ready when this plague hit. He had a fortress, he knew how to grow food and filter water, he had everything in place to survive. I needed to find him.

The problem was, I had no way to get out and find Henry without taking a semi-permanent leave of my comfy little fortress. I estimated that his property was at least 15 miles away across the city from where I was holed up. I supposed I could board up my little hideout and just come back later, if I couldn’t find Henry’s place. I could probably siphon gas from abandoned vehicles and drive there, but roads would be cluttered with abandoned cars and debris from accidents. I was fairly certain that given the choice between getting stuck outside at night with the zombies or walking 15 miles, I could high-tail it the 15 miles. But without Google Maps...did actual maps even exist anymore? I wasn’t a hundred percent certain if I could find his place at all.

It did occur to me that if I needed to get out in search of better living arrangements, food, etc., that I might find others doing the same thing. But I really wasn’t sure that this would be a good thing. If my first instinct was to run for the hills and hide away from a decomposing society (haha), so was probably everyone else’s.

And how do I know I wouldn’t get snatched to be some middle-aged, woman-hater’s sex slave? Or worse, what if some crunchy-mom-turned-crusty-mother-bear shot me so I wouldn’t steal her kid’s food? Could I hold my own in a fight with a gang of scared teenagers trying to kill me for my machete? I stewed on this for quite some time and ultimately decided I’d have to leave my hideout eventually, so why not get a head start before I was completely starved of food and irrational with unfulfilled sex drive?

And come on, I was still young. Compared to what it is now, my body was a ripe, juicy peach waiting to get bitten, although it was getting fuzzier too. Anyhow—ultimately, I reasoned, I couldn’t continue this mode of living.

I was a hunter-gatherer trying to defend property that didn’t sustain me.

I was a perfect, living specimen, maybe humanity’s only hope to rebuild. That alone should be justification for banging the first healthy human I encountered.

Which would hopefully be Henry.