Talk out your big decisions. Hear both opinions before you decide if you’re going to flee the city or hole up with Campbell’s Soup and CNN.

Dave continued to stare at the mangled body on the bathroom floor, which was pooling with blood and mung now.

“So you killed him with what now?”

“I tried that Dr. Phil book at first,” I sighed as I looked at the offending tome, lying next to Jack’s lifeless body, its pages caked with fluids and unidentifiable mush. “And I finished off with the toilet seat. Just so you know, you left it up again. That drives me crazy.”

“Sorry,” he said, his voice flat and emotionless.

He gave an absent nod as he pulled the door shut. It was weird how quickly all this was becoming normal, commonplace.

“Come on, we have to watch this,” he said as he motioned to the television. “It’s like all hell is breaking loose… literally.”

I’m sort of sad to say that I pretty much instantly forgot about the man I’d just brutally killed in the bathroom. I moved to the couch with David and we sat close together on the edge of the cushions.

CNN was the station he’d chosen. An anchorman sat at the desk, his face long and serious as he spoke in that weird, droning voice that I guess they must teach them in journalism school.

“The outbreak is thought to have begun in a high-security laboratory housed on the University of Washington campus and has spread with enormous speed throughout the city. Attacks by the infected have been reported all across the greater Seattle area, which contains close to four million people. We go to local reporter Henry Greene for more.”

The screen switched to another man in a bad suit who was standing near the famous Pike Place Market. Its iconic sign blinked as dusky darkness began to settle over the troubled city.

“Thanks, Roger,” Reporter Henry Greene said as he looked straight into the camera without even blinking. “There are several reports I can update you on. First, there were rumors that one of the infected managed to board a flight to San Francisco. This has been confirmed by the FAA just in the last few moments. It seems that the plane is now running entirely on autopilot as the crew and the roster of passengers have apparently been stricken by this infection mid-air. The Pentagon is now debating whether to shoot it down over an area of low population rather than allow the flight to land as planned on its auto-nav system. We should have more on that developing situation within the hour.”

“God,” I whispered, trying hard not to think of those poor people trapped on the doomed flight.

I’d never really liked flying. That was the one bonus to barely scraping by, if we wanted to get somewhere, we drove or took the bus. Now I guess it was an even better idea. More room for escape in those modes of transportation.

“In addition, several fires have started in the downtown area and we have heard that…”

The reporter stopped as his never-wavering stare suddenly flicked away from the camera and instead moved off in the distance. His eyes widened slightly.

“Uh, Ken…” he said, clearly talking to a producer or the camera man. “Ken, do you hear that noise? What is th — oh my God!”

The camera spun and looked up the steep hill in the distance. The shaking lens was off focus for a minute, then it auto-corrected and both Dave and I gasped at once. There was a huge group of people standing at the top of the hill just a block from the market.

Okay, not people. Zombies. They were growling and lurching and that was the first time we ever saw them run in a herd. They rushed down toward the market en masse, their cries and grunts audible even from the distance.

“Christ, Henry, run!” the man behind the camera said, his voice muffled since the mike wasn’t pointed toward his mouth.

The reporter was already a few strides in front of him, running toward the partly enclosed market. The camera bounced almost like it was shooting a really low-budget “handheld” horror movie as the cameraman followed, but before they’d gotten too far another mob of growling creatures began to flood from the open stalls in front of them, crowding toward the two men as sludge poured from their lips and bared teeth.

“Oh no —” the reporter whispered, his voice strangely soft and calm as he faced what could be nothing but his ultimate demise.

But then the voice cut away and the screen switched back to the CNN reporter at the anchor desk. He was now almost as gray as the zombies were and he stared at the camera with a disbelieving and utterly horrified expression.

I would assume that wasn’t something they taught in journalism school.

“We — we’ve obviously had some technical difficulties, folks,” he finally said as he shook himself awake from his stunned fog. “But I assure you we’ll work to keep you updated on the situation with local coverage on the ground and try… well, we’ll try to get back with Henry shortly.”

Dave’s eyebrows lifted with disbelief. “Yeah. Henry’s a zombie, dude.”

I nodded. “We now go to Zombie Reporter Henry Greene on the scene,” I answered, mocking the CNN reporter’s cadence. “Henry want brains.”

Dave didn’t laugh, but he smiled, which was about as good as it was going to get at this point. The reporter continued to drone on in the background, telling us all to stay in our homes and remain calm.

I shook my head at the idea of doing either of those things. “Did you hear what he said about Seattle?”

Dave rolled his eyes at me. “Um, that we’re at the heart of a zombie plague. Yeah, Sarah, I got that.”

“No,” I snapped, irritated by his defensiveness. “I meant what he said about how many people are in this area. Four million, David. Four million people.”

He kept watching the screen, reminding me of so many times I’d tried to talk to him but his video game was more important. Or his show. Or whatever.

“So?” he said.

“So!” I repeated with a wave of my hands that finally got his attention again. “We’ve already seen how fast this thing, whatever it is, is spreading. Think about it… if it started at U-Dub sometime today, that’s miles from where Dr. Kelly’s office is… um, was.”

He nodded. “I guess.”

I continued without slowing down. “Hell, someone infected got all the way to Sea-Tac, through security and boarded a plane before anyone caught it, which probably means they were bitten right at or even in the airport which is what… twenty miles away from the university?”

Dave stopped giving me the look and nodded somberly. “I get what you’re saying. It’s spreading fast.”

“I’m saying that this city is a buffet,” I said as I got up and paced the small room. “If they don’t get it under control, there are going to be more zombies than people in a pretty damn short amount of time.”

David’s focus shifted back to the television screen, where they were now showing footage taken from the ever-filming camera at the top of the tower in Red Square at the University of Washington. It was a steady shot, so it didn’t pan as lurching zombies moved in and out of frame below. Occasionally an uninfected person ran through the scene, but he or she was almost always chased by an undead bastard or twenty.

“If we aren’t outnumbered already,” Dave whispered with a shiver. “Maybe staying here isn’t such a hot idea.”

I nodded. That had been my thought, too.

“Yeah, but that means going back out into the street,” I whispered. “And facing… them. Lots of them. So if we decide to leave… then what do we do to keep from getting turned into zombies?”

He pulled his gaze from the screen. “Well, we’ve watched a lot of zombie flicks.”

I arched a brow, a little action I’m pretty proud of perfecting since it took me months of practice. “Are you suggesting that we can battle real zombies with horror movie techniques?”

“Why not?” he asked with a shrug.

I rolled my eyes. “Yeah. This isn’t that movie Scream.”

He frowned, clearly annoyed once again by my lack of faith in his ideas. “Well, do you have a better idea? It’s not like you can find out information about real zombies online. Anything anyone knows about this kind of stuff comes from watching movies or reading books on the subject. Fiction books, Sarah.”

I opened and shut my mouth, unable to formulate any kind of response. Once again, to my great frustration, Dave was right. I mean, I couldn’t think of one thing I knew about zombies that didn’t come from movies.

We used to love those flicks, sitting together on the couch in the dark. Lately I hadn’t been watching movies with him as much. With all our fighting and me working as much as I could to keep us financially afloat, it hadn’t been a priority. But I guess I had just as good a grasp on the genre as anyone. And at least if we put together a list of what we knew it felt like we were doing something rather than just sitting around waiting for the National Guard to get their act together.

“Okay, so what do we know about zombies?” I finally sighed.

He grinned at my agreement to take part in this little exercise even though I still had serious doubts about it.

“Well, when someone is bitten, they turn into a zombie,” he offered. “But it doesn’t seem to be airborne or passed by any touch that doesn’t break the flesh.”

I shivered at the idea, still more terrifying than anything to me. “And we know that from personal experience, not just movies. So score one for Dawn of the Dead; they got that part right.” I smiled though it didn’t feel very strong. “Maybe this idea isn’t so far off the mark after all.”

“Gee, thanks,” he said in a flat tone. “So what else? We know they want to feed on live people, but they don’t seem to feed on other zombies. At least we haven’t seen that.”

“True, the Wonderful Wilsons and the zombies on the side of the road even worked together to feed.” I was starting to get more into this little exercise and I started to wish I had a notebook to write it all down. “And we both saw the group that just got that poor reporter and his cameraman. They were almost like some kind of fucked up pack of animals from Wild America or something. But what about other animals? Or just meat like in a store? Would they eat stuff like that? Could an animal be turned into a zombie?”

Dave shrugged. “We don’t know about that yet. I guess we just keep an eye out. If animals were infected… that could be bad. They can hide a lot better than a person.”

I shut my eyes and tried not to think too hard about Fluffy the Friendly Terrier or Ming the Cat becoming a killing machine. To keep my mind off the subject, I tried to pull together some more information to add to our running tally.

“It seems like a head injury stops them cold if it’s bad enough. Like with the shoe in Dr. Kelly’s head or the toilet seat and Jack.”

“In the movies they have shotguns and other weapons,” Dave said.

I nodded. That was very true. “Too bad we don’t have anything like that, but I guess we could try to get them if we went out. I mean, sporting goods stores carry that stuff. We could break in or maybe we’ll even find people hiding there to team up with.”

He smiled. “We’ll put it on the to do list.”

I laughed because my ‘to do’ list is legendary around our house. I love crossing off the stuff I’ve done. It drives Dave crazy because he’s much more fly by the seat of his pants.

Dr. Kelly once said we needed to find a way to respect our differences and use them to our advantage. Turns out we only needed to kill her in order to make that a reality. I wish we’d known that months and thousands of dollars ago.

“As far as weapons go, until we can find a place that carries guns and ammo, we can look around the house for stuff that might work. So far we’ve done pretty well with using what was available,” I said.

“We have,” he agreed. “That shoe idea in Dr. Kelly’s office was pretty sharp. So was using the toilet seat on Jack.”

I blushed. Dave hadn’t complimented me in a long time and I felt positively girlish now. “Thanks.”

“We should also see how much food we have that’s non-perishable and portable,” he said. “Even if we decide not to go, but stay here for a while, we’ll have to ration. And we should eat the perishable stuff first since we have no idea if we’ll be losing power or something soon.”

I swallowed hard. I hadn’t thought about that, but it was a possibility. The government could shut the lights down if they got it in their heads. Or if there wasn’t anyone left to mind the power plants… well, they’d shut themselves down at some point.

I’d learned that disturbing tidbit from the Discovery Channel, though, not zombie movies.

“I’ll start the oven and cook a frozen pizza for dinner tonight. And I’ll start sorting food and make a tally of what we have,” I said, moving toward the kitchen. But before I’d gotten into the other room, there was a knock at the door.

Dave and I froze and I slowly turned back to face him. He stared at the door and then at me before he looked around the cramped living room for some kind of weapon. With a grin, he found the wooden baseball bat that had been propped up in the corner unused since Dave dropped out of graduate school and quit his school softball team.

I smiled at his choice. “Zombie movie classic,” I whispered. “Nice.”

I looked around for my own weapon and my gaze fell onto our wedding photo. It was a big one my Mom had insisted we buy from the photographer. An eleven by fourteen monstrosity of us standing in front of a church with rice scattering in front of us. We looked happy. We were happy.

I pulled the photo down and turned it so that a corner was ready to be used as a bludgeon.

“And once again, very creative,” he encouraged.

I smiled, then cautiously moved toward the door.

The knock sounded again, this time louder.

“Dave? Sarah? It’s Amanda!” came a voice from the hallway.

My mouth dropped open. I mean, I knew I’d had to kill Jack in the bathroom, but I hadn’t really thought about facing his live-in girlfriend, Amanda, after I did it.

I moved on the door, but Dave grabbed my wrist. “Sarah, if Jack was a zombie, it follows that she might be bitten, too,” he whispered in a harsh, low tone that hardly carried.

I jerked my hand away from the door and stared at it. He was right. I hadn’t been thinking about my safety, just my rapidly increasing guilt.

“Please, if you’re there let me in!” she said from the other side. I could hear she had been crying and was just barely holding it together now.

I inched forward and put my eye up to the peephole. Fuck, it was too hard to tell if she was infected. In the wavy image, I could see her clothing was caked with blood and her brown hair was falling out of its usually sleek ponytail. She’d clearly been through something, but both Dave and I were also coated in blood and we were still rational humans.

“Amanda, have you been bitten?” I asked, taking the risk of letting her know we were home and still had tasty brains for hungry zombies.

Dave slapped at my arm lightly, but I ignored him.

“What?” she sobbed. “Please, Jack went crazy and I crashed the car and cut my arm all up on the glass. I can’t find him now and the TV is really freaking me out.”

My heel bounced on the linoleum, a nervous habit of mine, as I stared out at her. She looked around the hall, huddled up as small as she could make herself. She looked scared, that was the one thing I could see for sure. The girl wasn’t the brightest bulb and her taste in men sucked, but I still sort of liked her.

“Amanda, I’m going to open the door, but if you try to eat us, I’ll fucking kill you.”

“What?” her muffled voice elevated to a squeak on the other side of the door.

“Sarah,” Dave sighed from behind me.

I turned on him. “I killed her boyfriend. I should at least let her in and we can see if she’s… zombiefied or whatever.”

He shrugged. “I guess we can manage to murder one more acquaintance if it comes to that.”

I hoped it wouldn’t as I slipped the lock free and opened the door.