What was friendship, but a promise to shoot the other in case they got infected in a zombie apocalypse? The people of this world didn’t expect to have to take such a hypothetical so seriously.

Friendships often failed along this seam, but not Aurelia, and not James. They, of the Diliman Scouts, made their promises to each other a long time ago, and those promises would soon have to be fulfilled.

Their guns were pointed at each other, even while James helped Aurelia apply pressure to the chunk of her arm that was just gone—to her, it was just a loss of sensation. Whatever pain she should have felt just wasn’t there. James’s decision-making was more painful at the moment.

“I’m not fucking gonna shoot you like this!” James shouted.

“Then why the fuck are you pointing a gun at me?!”

The bus’s windows were covered with security grills, so even if every bit of glass had turned to sand, and the noise of hundreds of angry zombies clawing at the grills perforated their eardrums, they could still argue like this.

“Fucking coward!” Aurelia shouted.

“That’s not my line of thinking!”

“Then explain!”

“Hear me out!” James put away his gun for a moment. “If I shoot you right now, I’m supposed to escape after! Right?”

“Right!”

“But then the fuckin’ zombies are gonna come in!”

“Okay?”

“There’s not gonna be a fucking body when we come back! At least give me a body to bury, fucking damn it!”

Aurelia paused and lowered her gun. The weight of the issue hit her all at once like a bus, but deflected it all with a “Point taken!” The zombie outside the window above her snarled. “Fucking now what, though?!”

The day was coming to a close. Aurelia’s wound had miraculously clotted over, but that was just the zombies’ way of keeping someone alive long enough to transform.

They both slumped down against the same headrest, the seat it was attached to being 90 degrees from normal. The whole bus was 90 degrees from normal. At least the zombies were all just in one direction—above them, clambering over each other on what used to be passenger windows, now turned into skylights for a decaying sun that they couldn’t even have a glimpse of past all the squirming bodies.

Backup would be days away, if their backup could do anything at all. They only had nets and concrete anchor bolts as the only real way to deal with huge hordes like these. There were probably more zombies in this one horde than the whole of Diliman had bullets.

James nestled in against Aurelia’s uninjured side so they wouldn’t have to shout.

“You’re still gonna have to shoot me, in the end,” Aurelia said.

“Not until the last second,” James replied. “Let’s talk a bit longer until then.”

So, they talked.

About high school.

About college.

About how she changed his outlook on life. His smile was blinding in that moment. She didn’t want to look at it.

“Why’d you never ask me out?” she said, instead.

“Didn’t feel right.”

“Why not?”

James shrugged. “You’re my bestfriend.”

“So you have a personal rule about bestfriends?”

“Nah. Just you, specifically.”

Stolen novel; please report.

Aurelia laughed. “What about me?”

“It just sort of never felt like I needed to, y’know?”

“No, I don’t.”

James shook his head. “Not sure how I’ll make you understand when we don’t have much time left.”

The veins on Aurelia’s skin were beginning to turn black. She wiped the tear on James’s cheek.

“Crybaby,” she said. She closed her eyes. She didn’t want to feel her own tears.

They leaned in and touched foreheads. For just this moment, their breathing was louder than the clambering of the dead outside.

Then something else was getting louder. An electric whining, like a motor—a drone?

“Wait a sec,” James said. He cupped his hand behind his ear.

The silence was deafening. Aurelia realized it, too.

They looked up. The zombies weren’t there anymore. It was just orange sky.

A droplet of blood hit James’s eye protection. It was dripping from the edge of the window.

There was that electric whirring again, but it was closer. A lot closer.

“James,” Aurelia patted his arm and pointed at something down the aisle of the bus. She had her gun out.

He turned around and raised his gun at whatever it was, but he didn’t expect to be face-to-face with what was obviously a recon drone. It was about 10 cm long, shaped like a conventional helicopter. It had a little camera under its nose.

“What the fuck,” he said.

***

“Uh, sir,” Eliso said. He was alone on a roof on drone operator duty. “R-2 made contact with two survivors. One appears injured. Marking them on tac net.”

“Acknowledged,” Coronel replied. “C4T, take direct control of the units in that area and escort the survivors to the 122 Mercury Safehouse. I’ll come by after the mop-up.”

“Too many moving factors. Fire support necessary,” C4T messaged.

“Eliso, put the recon drones on auto and have one of them on top of the survivors at all times. Keep the H-gun on you.”

Eliso sighed. That thing was heavy and way too loud, but it had the firepower to take out a Beta. “Yes, sir.”

***

The small drone in front of the two survivors started blinking a blue light and zipping around restlessly.

“I think they want us to follow,” James said. Aurelia nodded. They didn’t have much choice.

James offered a hand for her to stand, but she could stand just fine. Her arm was tied up in a sling, however, and she couldn’t move it.

Along the way to the rear of the bus, their footsteps rattled the window grills beneath them. James knocked out a hatch, a little high near a skywards seat. It opened up to the bus’s secondary baggage compartment, which, a crowbar later, opened up to the outside world.

James boosted Aurelia up, and when she came out, standing on the overturned bus’s side, she was frozen in shock for a moment, observing the bodies all around and the blood pooling under them.

“Aurelia?”

“Right. You gotta see this.”

He pulled himself out. “Holy shit,” were his first words.

The drone buzzed in front of them, then off to another direction. They jumped off to follow, fessing up their landing because of the messy—and bloody—footing, but they ignored the bodies as best they could. They weren’t alienated from stepping on so many of them, but it wasn’t ever something they could completely get used to.

They and the overturned bus were in a side road, away from the main thoroughfare, but that only meant that they could still hear the rouse of the horde in the distance. They sounded…quite worked up at the moment. Whatever had killed the mini-horde around their bus must have been reaping the main horde right this moment.

Almost immediately, a wall of zombies from the thoroughfare came flooding into their little side road. They were still a hundred meters out, but the sight instilled the raw, unfiltered spirit of two words in them: We’re fucked.

Just then, a trio of dogs came out from one of the buildings—at least, that was what they looked like. Two of them started shooting with white muzzle flashes from the guns on their backs, and the third birthed dozens of little dots that descended into the horde, making splashes like in a swimming pool. Seconds later, the zombies were dropping dead like they were just switched off.

“What the fuck’s going on?” Aurelia muttered.

The drone zipped in front of them, blinking a red light, all very annoyed.

“Operator’s pissed at us. Come on.” James held Aurelia’s arm and tugged her away from watching the wall of corpses grow.

They jogged the other way. The drone kept turning around every so often, as if making sure they hadn’t gotten lost.

The roads were getting narrower and narrower, which was good—they were getting farther away from that hellish highway. That didn’t mean they were free from danger.

The drone abruptly stopped, then zipped right back from where it came. They hesitated to follow, but when one of those Rams—the ones with the bony exoskeleton—entered the street, they decided the drone had a good idea, and they ran after it, but not after catching a glimpse of one of those gun-dogs tackling it from the back, stabbing it five times a second with two tentacle-limbs.

“What the fuck’s going on!” James cried out.

They followed the drone until it stopped again. What is it, this time!

It was another one of those Rams, and it was beating down an…awfully durable door.

“Hey, aren’t we supposed to turn around? Why’s the drone stopped?” Aurelia asked.

The Ram turned around and met eyes with them. James and Aurelia met eyes for a split second, coming to a unanimous “Fuck this, we’re out” decision.

Before their legs could carry on with that decision, however, the Ram’s head turned to mist, and the sound of a veritable cannon reached them.

“Wow,” they said at once.

The door opened, and an awfully-black cat with a mysterious, metallic lustre to its skin meowed at them.

“James.” Aurelia pointed at it. “It’s a cat.”

“I can see that.”

“It’s a real fucking cat, James.”

“No, yeah, I know, just—”

“My dying wish is to pet it.”

James stared at her. She stared back. “Bop it in the head,” she said.