Nick peered out between the living room blinds at an overcast sky above tranquil suburban streets that were neither flowing with blood nor choked with the living dead. He’d been trying to bring up he topic of their encroaching inevitable doom with mother for the past few days, and such vistas would have been a natural conversation starter.

He couldn’t see any way around a potentially ugly scene, bristling with the possibility of not only maternal disappointment but mockery as well. As a matter of life and death, Nick didn’t feel like he could keep putting it off. The time was nigh.

Yet… there. Far off. Beyond the rows of single-level ranch style homes with their low peaked roofs and Association-Approved black shingles, he could see a tinge of orange to the sky. Maybe even some smoke, from the city. It was a conversational In.

Nick closed his eyes and rubbed the back of his neck, letting the blinds snap back as he stepped away to face his mother. “Cities are getting worse. We should go.”

His mother’s drawn form was still in the wicker chair next to the couch, still save for the regular movement of her thumb as she scrolled through her phone’s social media feeds. “Can tell that from here, can you?” Her voice was bored, patient, bemused.

A tone Nick knew all too well. He’d heard it when he told her he’d wanted to study game design in school, when a year later he’d told her that he’d dropped out of school to get some real experience, and a year after that when he asked if he could move back home until he’d gotten back on his feet.

You know, when the job market had collapsed and the recession hit. In 2007.

“There’s smoke.” He gestured towards the windows.

“We’re twenty miles away, Nick.” Mom didn’t even look up. “Someone’s burning leaves.”

Nick’s fists tightened, nails cutting into the palms of his hands, heart beating in his ears. He normally enjoyed the back and forth banter where his mother would disregard his concerns entirely while he tried to express himself, but there just wasn’t time. He swept dramatically across the living room to snatch up the universal remote from the top of the bookshelf and clicked it towards his mother’s flatscreen. “Are these burning leaves?”

Instantly, the blank expanse was filled with the image of a cartoon skeleton chasing a similarly animated rabbit through a haunted house.

Nick bit his lip, thumbed the channel button a few times, settling on the 24-hour news station where the children’s entertainment was replaced by wide angle shots of tear-gas flooded streets through which marched police kitted out in full paramilitary riot gear. Distant flames reflected off their visors, casting an orange glow through the thick smoke.

His mother looked up, over the rims of her cat-eye glasses, and shook her head. “Just awful. They look like soldiers.”

“Let’s get away,” Nick put the remote down and practically fell to one knee next to her chair. “Just for the weekend. Up to uncle Joe’s cabin. Just in case.”

His mother gave him a blank stare before responding. “You want to run away to Canada on zero notice? For this?” She gestured at the television, now showing the protesters – or rioters, depending on which channel you were watching – beginning to emerge from the smoke. “Nick, they’re twenty miles away! Don’t you think you’re being a little silly?”

Nick rose and stalked to the window, peering out again.

An Amazon delivery guy, passing by on the sidewalk, caught sight of him, gave him a friendly wave.

Nick narrowed his eyes. “No, I know. I just… I’m worried, Mom. Really worried this time. Please. Let’s just… go. Can we go?”

She turned back to her phone. “So go if you want to go. I’ve got laundry to do. Might do you some good to get away from the news, it if agitates you so much. Get your head together, maybe fill out some job applications.”

“Mom, please.” Nick heard the pleading tone enter his voice, hated it, but didn’t excise it.

Mom put down her phone. “I don’t know what’s gotten into you. You’ve barely paid attention to the marches and protests over the summer… even after that nice girl Janice invited you out to join her. And now, suddenly, you’re worried about this one? What’s changed?”

Nick didn’t know what to tell her. Not the truth – or at least, what he suspected to be the truth. His eyes flickered down to the go-bag he’d left by the door, the one he’d been keeping packed for two years now, since his dad had passed away. It’d started as a half-joke, half-expression of his brief survivalist phase… one that’d ended after he realized how boring going “off grid” really was.

The truth… the truth was that he’d grown increasingly convinced over the course of his adult life that the world was heading for a collapse. Ecological. Economic. Social. Probably all at once. This made him feel powerless – especially with dad gone – so having the duffel bag ready to go made him feel a little more in control.

So he’d been ready. When his friends or mom had teased him about it, he’d laugh and say something about the zombie apocalypse. That was the end of it; everybody knew he loved those movies.

He’d just never expected it to actually happen that way.

“It’s just a feeling I have,” Nick settled for saying. “Like this is really bad. You’ve seen the news… this isn’t Chicago, it’s happening all over the country.” Sudden violent uprisings, less protests than spontaneously angry mobs, in multiple cities, all erupting within hours of one another over the last few days. The left blamed right wing supremacists, the right blamed the perpetual boogeyman of antifa, some of Nick’s friends cheered what they thought was finally a popular revolution, but Nick… Nick knew.

It was the living dead. Walking corpses.

Revenants.

Zombies.

His first inkling had come while watching the news and seeing the digital map of where the trouble spots were. It’d instantly drawn parallels to pandemic spread maps. The kind you’d see in a zombie movie. Nick lacked the background in epidemiology to say for sure, but he’d wager that some jerk infected with the zombie virus had gotten on a plane, infected some other people, and then they all got off in other major cities to bite other people.

Of course, there were other signs as well. Signs and portents. Of the end times. Nick felt it with a cold certainty. There had been other, smaller incidents… Zombie flare ups. Increased aggression over the heat of the summer. Violent backlashes. Sudden riots. Federal warnings of symptoms that seemed pulled right from The Walking Dead or World War Z.

Of course, Nick couldn’t share his certainty with anyone. Yeah, there was some banter online, most of it jokes, a few people who seemed to be seriously discussing it – and of course Nick’s own friends would joke about it – but nobody he knew was taking it too seriously. And there’s no way Mom would buy it unless she saw Mr. Cavenaugh next door eating the mailman with her own two eyes.

Nick returned his gaze to the window, but the Amazon guy had just moved on to the other side of the street. It’d been a long-shot anyway.

“I thought you were going to look for work this weekend,” Mom said.

He pressed his forehead head through the blinds, against the cool glass of the window. There was nothing he wanted more than to save his mom. And there was nothing he was more certain than that she’d never go with him. He just… didn’t know if he had the words to convince her.

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The beta readers, here, got to vote on whether or not Nick was able to convince Mom to join him. Was he? Find out in episode 2!