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Each time the gun came down, Lonnie let out a sound he never wanted to hear again. It was a mixture of a pathetic whimper and a disheartening cry. It was pathetic.
    When the body stopped gyrating in feeble attempts to seize the only living thing left in the room, Lonnie threw the gun aside. He sat on his knees and looked at the mess that was once his father, the man who gave him life and helped bring him into the world.
    He tried to work up the same flow of tears he’d shed for Amy, tried to muster up the overwhelming feelings of loss and regret again, but he couldn’t.
    He stood and wiped the fluids from his nose and mouth, not realizing he was only wiping more of his father’s blood across his face with his stained knuckles. Unlike before when he was a sad, lost, heart-broken mess over losing the love of his life, his chest now rose slowly and deeply. He glared down at Buddy Lands and spat on the beaten, disfigured face.
    “Rot in hell, you stupid, no good, son of a bitch.”
     
     
     
    VII.
     
     
     
                  The rusted out blue Ford roared down highway twelve. The tires hummed and the body clanked as it sped as far away from the trailer park as it could get. Buddy’s loaded AR-15 sat on the passenger side of the bench seat, Lonnie on the other with both hands clenched around the wheel.
    His emotions were a jumbled mess. He wanted to cry, laugh, scream, cheer all at the same time. Amy was gone. The horror of her death would plague him forever and somewhere deep down would always be the urge to weep for that loss. Buddy, on the other hand, no matter how brutal his death came, was a burden lifted from Lonnie’s shoulders. He’d always said when his father died it would be a relief for him. No one ever believed it would be true, but it was. He felt free for the first time in his life, and that was both uplifting and sad.
    From the tree lines on either side of the road dozens of ravaged people shambled aimlessly around, their mouths red with blood, their clothes stained and torn, and their arms reaching for any living thing stupid enough to get close to them.
                  One of the females reached out for a living, breathing, teenage girl in red track pants and a Chesterton Indian’s t-shirt who ran by at full speed, just inches from the strong, dead hands. Its fingers grazed the tips of her long brown hair as she disappeared into the woods, leaving the undead woman to snap her ragged jaws at the hot air, lost over where her meal had run off to.
    For a split second, the straight sheet of chestnut hair flowing behind the petite figure made Lonnie’s heart ache. She looked just like Amy from the back. She always was a good runner, but mostly from the cops.
                  What happened to the world overnight? How could things have changed so quickly? When Lonnie went to bed everything had been normal—a drunken normal, but still relatively normal. People weren’t trying to eat each other or tear each other apart with their bare hands. Was the disease, or whatever it was, airborne? If so, then it was too late for him. He was already a dead man. But if it was a blood disease or a virus spread by fluids, then there was still a chance for him. The question was did he want it? Did he want to live? Did the gut-wrenching sadness over Amy surpass the joyous freedom in losing Buddy?
                  A line of cars were stopped several feet in front as he tried to turn off Dune’s highway twelve and onto IN-49. He hadn’t been thinking about where he was going as he drove, but he realized, as he hit the breaks, that he’d been heading the same way they used to drive to the Michigan cabin.
    He could still go. The key was on the ring with the truck’s. It would be the safest place for Lonnie to hide out, far away from anyone or anything else. He could ride the mess out for the week or two it took for the government to clean everything up and get it back to