There was a local sporting goods store not too far from their hotel; although, Spokane being what it was, the store heavily emphasized hunting and killing things. Clint, of course, had frequented all such stores before the world ended, and he led the way down the street. The little group walked softly through the early morning light as though the slightest scuffle of a shoe or dropped gun might bring a hoard of undead. And indeed, for all they knew it might.

The streets proved strangely quiet. Victor had expected more zombies. He had expected rotting hordes to come crawling out of the woodwork at their passage. But the three travelers passed unmolested through block after block. Smoke rose in the east, silhouetted by the rising sun, telling of greater carnage in the center of the city. But the outskirts, it seemed, had been abandoned. How many people had run north to Canada? How many zombies were trapped in basements, grinding softly against windows in a futile attempt to break free? Victor wasn’t certain, but the trip down Sunset Highway, such as it was, seemed it would be utterly silent.

He peered nervously into the windows of cheap Chinese food restaurants, run-down body shops, the McDonalds, the Wendy’s, the Burger King. He looked under the cars in tiny used car lots, sweat dripping from his eyebrows to the sidewalk. There was the terrible heat, but no undead. No regular dead. Just the normal decay of the outskirts, the functional ruins of an economic apocalypse that had hit this peripheral micro-city decades past, the aftermath of which it had never quite recovered from.

“Where is everyone?” Lauren asked in a whisper.

Victor could only shake his head.

“I don’t think you have to whisper,” Clint said, but when his voice seemed to echo back from the shoddy strip malls and across the street to the Shell station, he snapped his mouth shut.

Sure enough, mere seconds after he’d spoken, they heard groaning from the gas station.

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The group stopped walking and looked over. Victor hadn’t seen it before, on account of the strange shadows in the rising sun, but on closer inspection he saw a large blood pool on the other side of the pumps. And a hand, reaching between pumps, clawing towards the three survivors. A face and then a torso followed close after as the zombie pulled itself towards them. The thing pulled itself pathetically along the ground using the only limbs remaining to it, its hands. Victor, Lauren, and Clint were frozen. They couldn’t seem to move, couldn’t seem to stop watching as what remained of a middle-aged man crawled towards them, trailing intestines along the parking lot where it should have been trailing legs. Victor wanted to be sick. The visual turned his stomach, but the noise was worse. The wetness of the thing’s crawling, the squelching of it, the squishing-scraping of intestines being dragged along concrete, of blood-paint being drawn across the ground behind the half-a-zombie, it was all too much.

The dead thing made it to the edge of the street before Clint finally began to move. “Fuck this,” he said, jogging towards it.

“Clint,” Victor whisper-yelled. Clint was going to blow it away and the gunshot was going to draw more undead, and they were going to get swarmed and eaten alive on Sunset Highway, which had always been Victor’s least favorite stretch of Spokane.

Clint ignored him, and Victor watched in horror as his friend stepped around the zombie torso. It tried to shift, to turn and to somehow come to grips with Clint, its movements lethargic and stiff. Clint stood above it, watching it try, and shook his head. Then he reached down to his boot and pulled out a huge knife – more sword than knife, really – and straddled the poor dead creature. He slid the blade almost gingerly into the back of its head, and then it was still. He pulled the knife out and cleaned it on what remained of the creature’s shirt, before replacing it in his boot and crossing back over to Victor and Lauren. When he got close enough to whisper, he looked at them both.

“Please, if the worst ever happens and I end up like that, put me out of my misery. Okay?”

Lauren nodded, and Victor ran his finger idly along the tooth-shaped perforations in his shoulder, still fresh from the previous day’s zombie encounter.

“Okay,” Clint said. They continued down the street. They were almost to the store, and from there they would strike out into the wilderness, away from civilization and the zombie threat