Lindsey found Ryan slumped in the corner of the room, as far away from the zombie as he could get, and she exhaled through her nose before going and standing beside him. She was frustrated, to say the least.

"C'mon." She said. "I need your help." Ryan shook his head, so she crouched down and placed her hands on his arms. "Ryan, please." She was met with silence. "I thought you would've been the least bit grateful." With every word her voice got harder, and so did her grip. "Do you know how hard it is to go into a horde of zombies and pluck him from their grip? I fixed him up for you, kept him, hoping that I could find you and reunite you. And you're not even going to say thank you?" Her hands went up to his neck, forcing him to look at her. "Fine, then. You won't mind if I just let him out -"

"No!" He cried. He was trembling shooting glances between the zombie - not his dead boyfriend - and Lindsey. "Please...don't...don't..." He locked eyes with the zombie, and it seemed to still, warmth flooding into its eyes. If it wasn't so decayed, he'd might be mistaken in thinking that his boyfriend was back.

He shrugged off her hands and got to his feet, stepping closer to the cage in which the zombie stood, abnormally quiet. It was watching him closely, carefully, for reasons unknown. It was weird.

"Can't you, like...reverse the process?" He whispered, a foot away from the cage.

"No, Ryan. He's too decayed." Lindsey replied, straightening up. "He's too dead. His heart isn't even beating. I've managed to prolong the decaying process, but beyond that..."

"I reckon I could." He reached out, pressed his fingers against the bars, waiting for a hand to grab him. But no hand came. Instead, the zombie pressed its own hand to the same bar, mirroring that of its former lover. "I could do it. I created the virus in the first place, I bet I could -"

"I'm sorry, what?!"

He smiled. "My father was a neurobiologist. He was massively into the nervous system and brains and stuff. He was in a department that almost had the cure for various brain cancers and stuff, and I was his apprentice. And together we created this thing that we thought could be a cure, kinda like how a vaccination works, y'know?" Silence from Lindsey. "And so we injected it into someone with cancer, a volunteer, and we hoped that it would work. But twenty-four hours later, they were dead. And we thought, shit, what's happened? And then they were alive twenty minutes later, all pale and groaning and white-eyed, and we restrained it instantly. My father spent ages studying the brain, which seemed to be the only thing keeping it going, y'know? And then one day it bit him, and the next day he was one of them, and - and -"

"So this - all of this - what is essentially the end of the world...is your fault?"

Ryan nodded. "Yes," he whispered. There was silence from Lindsey, so he continued. "If you can turn Ray into a weird vampire-hybrid thing, then I can reverse the effects of a zombie bite. It should be easy."

"If it's so easy, then why hasn't anybody done it yet?"

"Because nobody's bothered to try."

~

He could smell them. They'd been gone for several hours, and the rain had washed away most of their tracks, but he could smell them.

They'd lingered around the gas station for some time, he knew, possibly for an hour? It hadn't been long. Maybe not as long as he'd thought. It didn't matter. So long as he could still smell them, and he could, though only faintly.

He'd find them soon enough, though. He had to.

~

Bert and Gerard were asleep, but they'd ended up outside some house, and Frank was bored. He was on edge and couldn't sleep even if he'd wanted to - he was supposed to be on watch, though wasn't doing a very good job of it, watching everything else but.

He found his eyes drawn to Gerard more often than not, and his stomach twisted with guilt from all the lies he'd told. In times like these, lies were your only friends. He'd lied about so many things, but he couldn't hope to rectify anything now; it was too late. He was too far gone. He was falling in love with Gerard and teaming up with him was a mistake, because both of them were a mess, even Bert was a mess and Frank hated the guy.

He shook his head, adjusting his eyepatch and opening the car door so he could get out. He was sick of sitting in the car, waiting for something to happen, wishing for sleep that would never come. Bert and Gerard would be okay by themselves. Or that was what he told himself as he snuck towards the house, knife in hand and nerves on edge.

There wasn't much to see inside the house - it had probably already been ransacked by survivors - but when he stepped into the kitchen and saw the bodies, he knew that he'd thought wrong. Or maybe the humans had been the survivors, the ones who were searching the place for food, and then the zombies came in and attacked the unsuspecting. Or something.

Whatever had happened, it looked grisly and gross. And there was so much blood.

Frank listened out for something that could make a sound, anything, anything at all, and he didn't move for at least four minutes, save for breathing and blinking. There were bloody handprints here, there and everywhere, and a zombie's head was lying a few feet away, with blood pooled around its mangled, rotten body separated from it. There was a strange kind of samurai sword loosely held in the hands of a teenage girl, who was lying with a zombie draped across her abdomen and half her throat torn out.

He bent down and plucked the sword from her grip, cleaning the blood on his shirt, and then grinned, waving it around a little. The blade whipped through the air, slicing it in half, as sharp as ever despite being thrust through a zombie.

"Hell yeah, I'm Kung Fu Panda." He said to himself, admiring the sword.

"Kung Fu Panda never had a sword." Bert said out of nowhere, making him jump, and he tucked the sword down the waistband of his torn jeans, turning towards him.

"Fuck off, Bert." He rolled his eyes. "Why have you left Gerard alone in the car? Bit dangerous, isn't it?"

"You left us."

"Whatever," he muttered, walking out of the kitchen. He was aiming to head upstairs, but something on the coffee table in the front room caught his attention.

It was a radio.

It was small and black, and he picked it up, his knife clattering against the plastic. He turned it over in his hands, inspecting it, and once it was the right way around again, he turned it on and fiddled with the various dials, setting the aerial upright while listening for something.

"What's that?" Bert asked, appearing beside him.

"The fuck do you think it is?"

All he could hear was crackly static, and he sighed, thumb brushing the off button, preparing to just ditch it and get back in the car.

"Gerard...Gerard please...help me..."

Frank jumped, the radio slipping from his hands and dropping to the filthy carpet beneath his feet. His heart thundered in his chest and he couldn't move, his eyes wide. Bert adopted the same expression, staring at the radio as if it had grown legs or something.

The soft, pleading voice floated from the device, shrouding the two men in horror as they realised that they recognised this voice.

"Gerard..." Coughing. "Please...I'm stuck...please help me..."

"Frank!" A voice yelled, snapping them out of their daze. "Bert!" Frank scrambled to pick up the radio just as Gerard stumbled in, eyes lidded with sleep and body fatigued. "Frank, why did you -"

Sobbing rose from the box in Frank's hands. "Gerard, please...please...it hurts..."

"Is that -" Gerard froze, similar to the way Frank and Bert had, hand poised in rubbing his eye and lips parted. "Frank, that's -"

"Everything hurts..."

"That's Mikey!"

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