They say everything's better with a little background music. Well if a bit of music is going to make this shit-show feel any better, then why not. My fingers tapped at the cracked screen of my phone as I put on a cute little playlist I used to listen to way back when before this mess started. I'm hiding in the cellar right how, but it's not like there's any wifi signal anyways, so my choices were limited to the playlists that I downloaded.

The slow, smoky voice of some pop singer filled the silence. The sound of piano made the dust dancing in the light look like a scene from an artsy, romantic film. They're right, a song does add something else to the air. But a breakup song? Nah. Not in the mood.

I settled for a playlist named 'nostalgia' before letting my arms slump at my side. Apparently even choosing a playlist costs more energy than I can afford right now.

A different song played, it was from one of the bands I used to listen to all the time. The slow beat of the drums, the lazy guitar, and the voice of a singer that held the finest tint of melancholy. Hmm, not bad. A song about the end of youth. Maybe that was why I named it 'nostalgia'. It was catchy, but a little bit sad. It held the same emotion as an old photo album. Or an eulogy for someone who died young and stupid.

I turned my head with great effort to look at the teddy bear besides me.

"Well, it's just you and me now buddy." My voice echoed in the empty cellar.

As if in reply, the tattered teddy bear's head drooped as it tilted forward and began to fall.

I reached out and caught it, righting the poor teddy bear — Toto, my sister used to call him — so that he sat with his back against the cold stone wall. I don't even know why I kept him. Maybe I'm more sentimental than I thought, towing my sister's favorite stuffed animal for months while I tried to get away from this hellhole. This whole city's been quarantined, and it's not like anyone would care whether there are survivors left. So here I am once more, back at our family's house. Except it's much more different without them. Some times I wonder where they are, if they've been eaten alive, or if they've been Turned, the parasitic worms wriggling in the network of their nervous system, making their brain into a hatchery of slimy yellowish eggs. Yeah, I've seen some. I've busted more skulls than I could count in the past few months, all to survive. It's not so hard after the first one honestly. But the site of those eggs gets me every time. It looks like rice spilling out of the cracked container of the cranium. Except more disgusting, because the eggs are slimy, and translucent enough to see a vague dark spot where the black head of the baby worms are. There's just so much of them. Sometimes they wouldn't even stay in the cranium properly, and would slip out of every orifice on the human head. There'd be white, beady little eggs, mixed with pink flecks of brain, slowly running down the undead's nose like snot. Or the horrendous mix will slip out of their ears, their eye sockets, run down the side of their face and plop on the ground as they stumble about. I remember puking until I nearly passed out the first time I saw it. I still get nauseous sometimes, especially when it's really bad. But you do what you have to do to survive.

That's what my mom used to say all the time while she was still alive.

At the start of all this, we'd done what everyone else with common sense had done. Having been through covid, we all know the drill. Stay in, keep an eye on the news, only go out when it's necessary, limit contact with other people, blah blah blah. To be honest we didn't even know what was really going on at first. It was a distant idea at the time, a growing alarm intermixed with speculation. It didn't sound too serious, but we still did everything we know to prevent this. They still got my mom and my sister anyways. Crashed through the window and snatched them right out.

We didn't know that the parasites were capable of doing that. Reanimating a dead corpse like something straight out of a horror movie. But by the time we found out, it was too late.

The last thing I saw of my family was my sister. Her wide eyed look of panic, and gosh I think she was screaming my name right before the throng of undead pounced on her, obscuring the rest from my view. She must've been so terrified and so confused.

I think, I'm being punished for being a coward. I should've just died with them that night.

Maybe that's why I came back here. I wonder if deep down, there's something under all this numbness, there's still some piece left of me. They say the undead are no longer human, but honestly I haven't felt human and sane in a long, long time. The old me felt like a fever dream, as if life before all of this was made up, and this is the only reality that existed. The life of a dorky college student now feels paper-thin to me. Gosh can you believe it? My biggest worry used to be whether the girl I liked, liked me back. And now I don't even remember her name. Heck, I might have bashed her head in with a crowbar last week for all I care.

But if there's still humanity left in this tired body, then it's probably the reason I'm here.

There's something poetic in returning to the place where my family died. As if dying here, in the same place but at a different time, somehow reaches across the divide and connects me to them. Maybe it's just fanciful thinking on my part, but I gotta have something to hold on to. My memories, and Toto too, apparently.

Toto slumped down against the wall. Just like me. His fuzzy exterior was tattered. The cream color was stained with the brown of dirt and the rust color of my sister's blood. One of his button eyes was missing, so there's only a black thread hanging loosely from where his right eye used to be. He's a little battered, and there were several gashes on his stomach where his stuffing was falling out. Just like me.

I leaned my head back against the wall and heaved a sigh, stirring the dank air.

The cellar door was thick enough to muffle but not completely drown out the chaos on the streets. The sound of blood-curdling screams is now so tame to my ears that I treat it just as any other noise of the night. Yep. Just a normal — Saturday now, was it?

My thumb found the power button on my banged-up phone. I pressed it, wincing at the sudden flare of bring light. I lifted a rubbery arm with great effort, like there were lead weights tied to my elbows. I cracked open my eyes and squinted at the screen. Wow, what a coincidence.

11:59 PM

Sat, Dec 31

My dry lips cracked into a ghost of a smile. Happy New Year to me.