The glass shattered at the back door. I ran over and peered around the corner at the door. The zombies were sticking their hands through where the glass windows along the sides of the door was. Though they were feeling around, they couldn’t find the lock on the door yet. But they were already turning the knob.

I ran back to my friends. They had already gone across the room and were looking for a side door. Or a window that opened. Turned out there were two more windows. But they were both painted shut, too.

“Break the window,” Teddy said.

“That would make enough noise to attract them,” Wood said.

“I think the zombies are too focused on trying to get in the door,” I said. “They won’t notice some broken glass.”

Teddy and Wood looked at me and nodded in agreement. When I looked over to Ellie her eyes were still wide and scared, but she had her Negan bat out, her hands fisted around its handle in a white knuckle grip.

I really hoped these were the shambling, Walking Dead kind of zombies, and not World War Z, inhumanly fast, sprinting kind.

The whole time this was going on, they just kept on ringing the doorbell. And they kept on calling out in their overly enthusiastic voices, “Avon!!!”

Talk about not taking no for an answer.

Wood picked up a straight backed chair from the kitten table and was coming back to us, about to go and throw it straight through the plate glass window, when he stopped in his tracks. We all heard a car horn blaring. And not just any car horn. This was an instrumental version of Pink Cadillac, played by a chorus of blasting horns.

The oddest thing was, the sound of the zombie Avon ladies trying to break into the house—and the damn doorbell ringing—just stopped.

We all abandoned the side window from the moment and made our way cautiously to the front of the house. There we stared out the front windows that, for some reason, the zombies hadn’t come through. I guess they were too used to coming through the front door, as Avon ladies.

So, I guessed, breaking in through a window was beneath them?

Outside, a large, early model pink Cadillac screeched to a halt in front of the house we were currently in. The pink Cadillac trumpeted their theme song once again.

Suddenly the number of zombie Avon ladies stationed on the front porch grew.

Wood turned to his brother and said, “Go check the back.” Teddy immediately stalked off soundlessly toward the back of the house.

I peered back out the front window, and all four doors to the pink Cadillac burst open, and at least ten women dressed in all pink, all of them with puffy blonde hair—and blood stains splattered and smeared all down their clothing—scrambled out of the car.

It was kind of like a big version of a clown car. Because there was no way any of them were sitting one zombie per seat.

And yes, all these women were zombies as well.

“I thought we settled this yesterday,” The rotting blonde in the front line of the Avon zombies said, her voice raw with irritation.

“I don’t know what reality program you were watching, but we totally snagged our client, and gave her a well-earned makeover. The Avon zombie woman pointed her arm over to a barely rotting Avon lady in a blue sweater with a dried blood stain running from her neck all the way down her front. It also looked like she had had her tongue eaten out of her face, and most of her lips, as well.

This story is posted elsewhere by the author. Help them out by reading the authentic version.

But she did have really nice hair. And her eye makeup was nice, too.

“This is Mary Kay territory,” The lead Cadillac lady hollered. “You Avon-hawking dumpster trash!”

Teddy appeared between me and wood and whispered, “They abandoned the back door.”

Would nodded, and turned to us. “Let’s go.”

And with that we left the front of the house, tiptoeing towards the back. We got to the back door and indeed there were no zombies waiting for us.

We unlocked and opened the back door, pushing it open—and knocking down what looked like an entire tree of cut lumber. It made one hell of a racket.

I was about to ask if they had been planning to burn us out, when we heard a cheer from upfront.

“They’re trying to escape!”

Tripping and stumbling over the lumber, we all got out of the house and started running as fast as we could, out of the back yard and straight down the back alley.

We had to leave our bikes behind, but luckily, we had more bikes in our inventory. So, as soon as we knew we were safe, we would stop long enough to pull them out, and then bike the rest of the way home.

It was the getting safely away part I was worried about.

Before we turned the corner, I glanced back over my shoulder. I saw both Avon zombies, and the Mary Kay zombies, trudging around from the front of the house. They are pushing at each other, one knocked the head off of another, and two of them tangled together and fell the ground, rolling down the yard.

Oh, thank God. They were the shambling, slow kind of zombies.

But I didn’t say anything about it right then. It was best for us to run for all we were worth until we felt we were safe.

We ran three blocks before Teddy looked back and said, “They’re nowhere in sight.”

That’s when Wood said, “Pull out some more bikes.”

Less than two minutes later and we were all on bikes. I was once again strapped to the back of Teddy’s bike, and we were off and peddling down the road.

***

By the time we got into Mars proper, I noticed that Ellie’s complexion was back to normal, and I felt a lot less nervous. Maybe we should’ve stopped and gotten off our bikes and put them into our inventories, and then spent the rest of our trip back to the pizzeria trying to find something to grind on. Some monster to kill.

But we didn’t. We rode our bikes all the way back to the pizzeria, not stopping, not looking around, not even saying a word. We just were all ready to go home.

Once we got our bikes back in into inventory, we all trooped into the pizzeria, and started figuring out what we—well, what they—were going to have for dinner.

Again, I stayed with my friends as they cooked, ate, and then I helped clean up. It wasn’t bothering me near as much that I couldn’t eat. I just had this overwhelming need to be around my friends.

As much as possible.

Once we got the pizza in the oven, and more top Ramen cooking on the stove, Ellie looked at me and said, “I wonder why they haven’t come into town? I mean, there are so many of them. And they were just staying in Reglan’s Bluff?”

I shook my head. “I don’t know. They seemed really territorial, from what I heard from their trash talking each other. I don’t think it’s occurred to them to leave.”

Ellie scrunched up her eyebrows and gave herself a little shake. “Thank God.”

We’d made an extra pizza to give to Jesse’s minions, and we took the pizza and the Ramen down the block to their house. And that’s when we saw a problem. The food we had made them yesterday was still there on the porch, untouched. We knocked on the door a few more times.

We didn’t hear anything from inside. So after a while, we just took the old food away, and left the new.

“Maybe they’re just out,” I said.

“Maybe,” Ellie said, as we walked back to the pizzeria.

“But I still don’t like it.”

***

Miss Biddle

I didn’t like it.

When Travis told me that we were being summoned, I didn’t like it. When Travis told me that this thing wasn’t even human, I really didn’t like it. Things that weren’t human were way harder to kill. I already had someone powerful enough to control me. I didn’t need another one.

When I found out we were going into the middle of the woods to meet this thing, I really, really didn’t like it. And when we came upon a kitchen appliance in the middle of the woods; a large, stainless steel monstrosity of a refrigerator, with double doors, I hated it.

“How do you know this guy?” I asked Travis.

“I used to play online with him. He’s really good at everything he does. He’s just kind of… single-minded.”

As we walked towards the shiny refrigerator, I thought to myself that I didn’t mind people who were single-minded. I, after all, am rather single minded, too.

I thought of few things anymore. Blood, revenge, and my new werewolf boyfriend.

As we started to get closer to the refrigerator, a strange shape started to warp out of its front panel.

The shape of a face. The face smiled.

“I’ve been looking forward to meeting you.”