Alexander Kjerulf

Billie put her headset and controller down on a folding table on the roof, then picked up the drone from the roof and set it down on the table too.

“We wanted to know how bad it is and now we know: it’s fucking bad, “ she said. “It’s only been two hours since the first reports of attacks and it looked like the entire town’s been overrun. The police station was broken into by people looking for guns which of course just let in the zombies. The fucking fire station is on fucking fire which is fucking ironic. And that thing at the stadium… Man, I hated coach Williamson and his stupid pack of jocks as much as the next nerd but seeing them all go down like that… Fuck!”

“It was not a smart move,” said Will, shifting his huge body. “Why leave an easily defensible position where the locker room tunnel makes a perfect choke point and run out to the field where they could be easily surrounded by an enemy that vastly outnumbered them? That’s tactics 101.”

“When people are under massive psychological pressure, they often revert to rote behavior. Coach Williamson was a bit of a…” Ella hesitated, looking for the right word.

“Asshole,” said Billie.

“Dick,” agreed Edward.

“He could be pretty unpleasant,” said Will.

The other three stared at him.

“Interesting,” said Edward in his painstakingly correct speaking style, “I do believe that is the harshest thing I’ve ever heard Big Willie say about another human being. And I once heard him say that Simon Cowell ‘could maybe try to be a little nicer, sometimes’.”

“Williamson was the fucking worst. And he brought out the worst in his players,” said Billie. Henderson was super friendly his junior year but after he made the team, he became such a dick. Remember that time we were sitting in the quad and he and two other turdnuggets from the team came over and…”

“AS I WAS SAYING,” said Ella loudly, trying to get the discussion back on track, “Williamson was a sociopath but he knew football in and out. When he was suddenly faced with a challenge that wasn’t just new but completely outside his field of reference he fell back on what he was familiar with. It’s the whole ‘if all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail’ thing.”

“Yeah, well if all you have tonight is a fucking hammer, a zombie is going to fucking chow down on you.”

“Agreed,” said Edward. “It really didn’t appear like blunt force trauma to the head even slowed the zombies down. I wonder what it actually takes to incapacitate or kill one.”

“Well we know some things that don’t work,” Ella said. “Over by the fire station several zombies caught flame and just kept going. Except that now they could bite people AND set fire to their hiding place at the same time.”

“What about guns?” said Will. “Guns have gotta work, right? Not that we have any, but we could probably get some.”

“This is red-state America. I think you can get arrested for not having a gun in your car and two in your home,” said Ella. “But we really…”

“I’VE GOT SOMETHING FOR YOU, YOU MONSTERS!” screamed a voice from the quad. They all ran to the other side of the roof and looked down into the quad. The quad was an open space ringed by four L-shaped buildings. Below, professor Markitt, the economics teacher, had run out the door of the building to the right of theirs. She looked around at the scattered zombies in front of her. She assumed a convincing-looking shooting stance, feet apart, holding what had to be an honest-to-goodness AK-47 against one shoulder. The rifle’s strap was around her neck and there were extra curved magazines strapped to her waist. She aimed at the nearest zombie, about fifteen feet from her, its back turned.

She pulled the trigger and the shot took off the top third of the zombie’s head. Markitt had clearly done a lot of shooting. The zombie did not keel over. It didn’t even stagger. Instead it turned around, started groaning and walked towards her.

This is where a less-experienced shooter might have panicked but Markitt had practiced for just this kind of scenario. Well, maybe not EXACTLY this one. In all of her many, many sessions at the gun range, she had pictured it as more of an inevitable societal collapse, mass riots, race war kinda thing but she was ready, by golly.

She was so completely focused on the closest zombie that she did not notice that every other zombie in the quad was walking towards her too.

“RUN,” Will shouted from the rooftop, “THEY’RE COMING!”

Professor Markitt didn’t hear him. She calmly switched the AK-47 to full auto and fired a short burst of bullets, taking out another big chunk of skull. The zombie still kept coming.

She switched tactics and put a long burst of bullets in its torso. No effect either.

Looking from the rooftop, Ella still felt that Markitt could make it if she’d turn and run for the doorway to the building behind, but instead she stood her ground and kept shooting bursts of bullets to absolutely no effect.

Ella and Will could see the inevitable outcome and turned away. Billie kept watching. Edward had been filming the whole thing on his phone. His face didn’t look horrified, just pensive and, maybe, mildly excited. His tall, skinny, black body was relaxed, as his dark eyes took in the scene below. Edward – always Edward, never Ed or Ned or Eddie – was nothing if not analytical. There was data to be gathered and organised and understood.

The first zombie Markitt had shot at got to her first but the others weren’t far behind and she was soon overrun. The zombies gnawed on her for about half a minute then suddenly seemed to lose interest at the same time. They stood up and wandered around aimlessly, leaving behind a mangled corpse.