It’s funny how you feel like there’s very little left to say when you’re in a situation where anything you say will be your last opportunity. Things either feel too trivial to bring up in your last moments, or too grand to possibly be able to do them justice in what little time you have.

This was the case for the couple at the cottage on Sunken Lake. It wasn’t that they weren’t in love, on the contrary, they were so in love that to say anything would mean baring to think about losing each other. As though acknowledging it would make it more real. They were not ignorant however, they knew what was inevitably coming.

He held her close, stroking her hair and wrapping his arms around her more tightly and protectively than he thought possible. He faced his last moments dealing with the guilt and anger of feeling like he should have done more to protect her. She held their last dying candle in their boarded up cottage trying desperately to push the morbid thoughts of what the quickest and least painful way to die could be in their circumstances.

The noise of hundreds of fingers scratching upon wood, stone, metal, until bleeding and raw now so familiar that it no longer caused fear or anxiety but provided a gnawing reminder of the inevitability of their situation. Once the zombies had found their location and they had bared themselves in, it had then become a waiting game.

They could wait forever, the couple only had as long as they themselves had food and water- or their own shelter holding together. They had already found themselves bared in the study. The slow trickling persistence of undead fingers eventually splitting wood and pushing forever forward.

The door to the study- their last door- had already begun to crack and whine under the constant strain. The couple had heard the same many rooms before, they knew what came next. This time.. this time however, they had no new place to fall back to.

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A rattling at the door handle, and the two flinched into each other, desperately holding onto their last few moments, their long months of imagining what their final moments could be finally unravelling before them. A shuffling of bodies, and the soft click of metal releasing and the door swings open with a whine, their last barrier removed.

She curls into a ball, a scream escaping her lips, the sheer wave of vulnerability overwhelming her senses. With numbed hands, his mind wild tears between the want to comfort, and the want to defend. His eyes raise, dilated, animalistic, looking for something, anything to defend them, and ultimately to their horrendous sight that had slipped into their sanctuary.

Rotting on its feet. Flesh, no longer serving a purpose clings to the skeletal frame in useless ribbons, bones, muscle and sinew alike weaving throughout, exposed to the air wherever the tattered and unrecognizably filthy remnants of a suit did not cover. The face a pallid color of death, teeth permanently bared, and a nose long ago lost, turn to the male, its clouded dead eyes locking onto his. Turning gently, the living corpse leans against the door, closing it once more, his weight coming to rest on it to ensure it stays that way.

“This isn’t some place you’re going to want to stay at.”

In the males mind, through the spinning blur of the room he hears words forming. Words that were far too articulate to be accompanying the chorus of the undead just outside the door. The couple both sat there already resigned to their fate, It took long awkward moments of the three staring at each other for the black cloak that had numbed their senses to register that something weird was even occurring. As though waking from a nightmare into an even more unsettling dream, the couple looked at each other and refocused.

The ghastly man was speaking, eloquently. Addressing them. 

The zombie heaves a sigh, resigned to this expected reaction. He takes a step forward, a hand coming impatiently to his hip the other gesturing to the closed door.

 “I get it, but trust me you want to come with me sooner rather than later.”