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distant, he grew irritable. She stopped calling, he stopped caring. Soon they were basically strangers again. The brief interlude was forgotten, and the two of them went back to their lives of uncertainty and quiet desperation.
    He gave himself a self-deprecating chuckle.
    For all that the world had changed, they hadn’t. The two of them were still living their half-lives, midway between life and death.
    But he had laughed louder than he wanted to, and she had heard him. He saw her cock her head to one side. She turned toward the truck where he was hiding, her shifting, searching gaze the only thing that separated her from the wandering corpses nearby.
    Kevin whistled faintly, just loud enough for her to hear.
    She staggered forward.
    For a moment, he thought of running away from there. What did he think he was doing anyway? What could he do? It wasn’t like they were going to run off together or anything. Not now. To fake it for any length of time at all, she had to go native in a mighty convincing kind of way.
    And that she certainly had.
    Kevin looked her up and down, from the stringy, matted mess that was her hair to her bare and blackened feet, and tried not to grimace at the stench that came off her. Her face was filthy, her lips cracked and flaking. Her clothes were so filthy and ratty he couldn’t even tell what color they had once been. Flies swarmed about her face.
    But she was standing right in front of him now, watching him. She swayed drunkenly, her mouth hanging open slightly. He wanted to hate her, but her eyes were overbright, pregnant with the suggestion of pain, and despite his loathing, he felt his heart breaking out of pity.
    He could, after all, still see the girl under all that grime and slathered gore. She had gotten skinny as a crack whore, but the curves were still in the right place. And she still had that cute little upturned nose that used to drive him wild when she smiled.
    “Hi, Mindy,” he said.
    She just stared at him, no expression on her face.
    “Hey, you know why they put fences around graveyards?” he asked her. Kevin waited a beat. “Because people are just dying to get in.”
    Again, he waited.
    Her expression didn’t change. She just stood there, swaying.
    “You heard that one, huh?”
    She might have nodded, but if so, it was faint, and he couldn’t be sure.
    “How about this one? A guy finds out he only has twelve hours to live. He goes home to his wife, determined to live it up for his last night on earth. So they have sex, and it’s great. An hour later, they do it again, and it’s even better. And then, a few hours after that, he tells her he thinks they can go at it a third time. ‘Easy for you to say,’ she tells him. ‘You don’t have to wake up in the morning.’”
    He beat his index fingers on the truck tire in front of him like he was firing off a rim shot. He smiled at her, and then the smile faded. Why in the hell was he doing this? There was no reaching this girl.
    And was he really so lonely that he was talking to a faker?
    But then he saw a flicker at the corner of her mouth, the faintest trace of a smile, and that brought a huge grin to his face.
    “Are you doing okay, Mindy?”
    The smile disappeared. He saw what looked like a tear forming in her eyes.
    He almost reached up for her hand then, and had one of the real zombies not let out a moan at that very moment, he might have thrown her over his shoulder and carried her away from there.
    But a few more real zombies had spotted him. Several were moaning now, staggering toward him. He’d been careless, and now it was time to go.
    “I’m staying in an apartment at Woodlawn and Spruce,” he said.
    A zombie dropped to the pavement and started crawling under the truck toward him.
    “I gotta go,” he said. “Remember, it’s the Bent Tree Apartments. Woodlawn and Spruce, number 318.”
    More zombies had gotten under the truck now. The lead one held up a mangled, handless arm, the blackened tips of