I won’t lie to you: I like to sleep in the nude. Having clothes on at night makes me feel itchy, dirty. And usually my clothing is covered with the gore of the dead that I’ve killed. So there’s that.

At the end of a long day of scrambling through the Great Wreck, of putting as many bullets in as many heads of the undead (read it again, it rhymes!) as I can (while burying my axe in one or two, just to keep sharp), and swinging a bat until my arms feel like lead, I strip off all my clothes and throw them out the window of the tenth-story apartment in the small building I’ve been using as my base. Quite a pile at the bottom of the tower, but with all the trash and debris clogging the streets, I don’t think anyone will really notice. And if they do, who cares? It’s just a bunch of T-shirts, skirts, and jeans that any of the hundreds of thousands of teenage girls used to wear before everything collapsed into a pile of rubble, technically dead, and flames. Technically dead, you say? Walking dead, I say. Shufflers, walkers, sprinters. Other types I can’t identify. Shufflers have been dead a long time and their bodies are falling apart. They’re slow moving, not too bright, and easy to put down, like a retarded dog. They have one foot in the grave, you might say. But then you might also say they have two feet in the grave, and you’d be right. And that would make you a Smart-Ass Bastard.

But I digress.

Don’t let that shuffling about fool you, though. Get spotted by a shuffler and he’ll let out a moan loud enough to attract others. Get cornered by a few hundred shufflers and you’re lunch. Maybe breakfast or dinner. Brunch perhaps? Or a midnight snack? I guess it depends on the time of day you’re eaten, and I don’t think your classification as a meal will matter much to you then, as they nibble on (and by nibble on, I mean rip great chunks of flesh from) your sensitive pieces and parts.

Walkers are a little more lively (ha, ha, zombie humor). Their bodies are in better shape; they can get up to a trot, maybe a fast jog. Sometimes even a run. Not a real run, mind you, but sort of a Special Olympics run. I’m a winner!

They also like to announce your presence to any and all of their surrounding friends. Zombie social networking in action. They will scream really loud when they spot you, bringing the whole fucking dead party down on your head. Still none too bright, but if you get more than a few headed your way, you’re in trouble.

Sprinters are the nasty ones. Alone, in pairs, in parks, in fairs, or…um…in groups, it doesn’t matter. They hone in on you with some weird radar in their heads, without ever having to actually see you. Then they hunt you down until you’re meat. It looks like they are really, really pissed off at being dead, and they don’t just scream when they see you. They shriek with a rage like I’ve never heard before. That gets their buddies all wee-wee’d up, and every dead body within a few blocks will try to break zombie sprinting records, racing to get its ass to the newly announced walking buffet. Even the shufflers move as fast as they can, which isn’t very fast, given that they are usually missing legs and feet and such, but they do try.

The Others, well, fuck them. They scare the ever-living shit out of me. They might look like you and me—dirty, pale, scared—but when you get close to one, it starts acting like a sprinter: pissed off, faster than fuck, and looking for a bite of your tender, living flesh. Finger-lickin’ good. Bump into one of these bastards and the next thing you know, you are the newest member of Club Dead.

Those dumb-asses behind their big impressive wall in Burbank? They call them Ash Angels. What kind of asshole names fucking little child monsters Ash Angels? The kind that surround their All-You-Can-Eat Buffet with a wall, light it up, and make all sorts of noise that tells the dead: “Here we are! Come and get it!” Those kinds of assholes.

Some of the folks I traveled with as I bounced from one group of survivors to the next thought that the Others might have partial immunity or some shit, a reservoir for the virus, as most of the normal dead decay away and can’t pass on their viral load to a new host. One egghead wanted to get a closer look at them. I said funny, they want to get a close look at you, too. He wanted to talk to them. I said they wanted to eat him and save the dinner talk for later. He used a lot of hoity-toity words like viral adaptability and immunosuppression strategies, but in the end, it was simply, oh my God, they’re eating me! Dumb-ass.

A bullet to the chest puts the Others down, but a few minutes later, they are back up in pure sprinter form, requiring a whole extra bullet, preferably (actually, it’s a necessity) to the head, to put them down again. Or a well-placed axe blade to the noodle. Or a not-so-well-placed blow to the brainpan with a bat. Either way, it’s extra effort that you might not be able to afford if a committee of those things is looking to have a word with you.

A very few of the infected are Others, but all get to be a sprinter if they are not too eaten-up on their first date with the dead. They get to run around a bit, play the Alpha Monster, and grab a bite to eat. But most of the sprinters wind down after a while and become walkers, then shufflers as their bodies fall apart. Thank God! If they all stayed sprinters, we might as well just line up and let them have at us! I mean, really, have you seen those fuckers in action? Fat, thin, young, old; it doesn’t matter: they are coming after you like Walmart shoppers on Black Friday. And if you are anything but an Olympic track star or maybe the Flash, you are about to find a few pounds of your flesh in one of those thing’s stomach.

So enough talk.

I head out into the Wreck first thing every morning, after the sun clears the eastern mountains. Never at night. And I never stay out after dark. The dead don’t need light to hunt you down, at least the fast ones don’t, and they lead the rest of shufflers to you once they have you pinned. I’ve seen it happen too many times. So as the sun begins to drop in the west, I start to make my way home. Sometimes I have only a few of the shufflers trailing along behind me, and I can send them to a permanent grave quickly. Other times I’ll have a whole fucking cheerleading squad following me, and I’ll have to go round and round until I lose them. Only then do I head into my building and make my way carefully up to the tenth floor.

I say carefully because, even after six months of clearing out the area around the building, a few drifters have managed to wander in from time to time. I even found a sprinter on the ground floor once, but it came at me as soon as it sensed I was near. This one was a real cutie, just a teenager like me when he was turned. I could tell because his face was mostly intact when he tore around the corner, screaming in that crazy rage that fills the sprinters when they lock on to you. I hesitated for only a second, wondering what he was like when he was not, technically speaking, dead, then smashed his brains across the apartment building’s lobby as he rushed at me. What a waste.

The apartment I use is one of four at the top of the building. I’ve completely boarded up two, and the one I use for decontamination and supplies has a nice, solid steel door that I can lock on my way out and bolt shut once I am in. I enter that apartment, drop all my gear, strip off my filthy and usually gore-splattered clothes, and shower, making sure all the goop, blood, and viscera are washed away. Then I wash again with pure chlorine bleach, then again with soap. This way, I hope to clean off any of the virus or bacteria or whatever it was that started this whole mess in the first place.

After that, I clean my gear and set it up for the next day: filling my pack with water, packing in as much ammo as I can, reloading all my weapons, sharpening the blade of the axe I carry, and notching the bat to keep count of all the home runs I have scored. And by home runs (for the slower readers out there), I mean dead craniums that I have crushed. Then, and only then, I crawl through a hole in the wall—the smallest I could cut in the back of a closet—into the adjacent apartment I call home. Once in, I push a large rolling safe in front of the hole and lock the wheels to keep anything that might breach the other apartment out. It’s completely sealed up: every door and window, every possible way in, except the three large bay windows that overlook the ocean to the west, the shore to the south, and the Wreck to the east. I am not going to live whatever life I have left in a black box. A girl has standards, you know.

I don’t think the dead can get to me through the big windows. The apartment overhangs the floor beneath mine in all directions, and if the dead start scaling walls or leaping up ten stories, well, I’m pretty fucking screwed anyway. So I left these windows open, and I watch every night as the smoke blows over the nearly dead city and the sun slips into the ocean. I usually fall sleep with a shotgun cradled in my arms. I may be secured in my little hole atop an empty building, but I keep it close just the same.

I wake up the next day; pull on panties, a sports bra, a long-sleeved shirt, and jeans—sometimes a skirt if I’m feeling frisky. Then my leather bite armor goes on around my arms, legs, and neck, wrapped and tied tight. It keeps the most determined biters at bay. If more than one gets on top of me, though, it’ll be all over anyway.

In the beginning, I strapped on a full-face respirator, but it gave me headaches and cut off my peripheral vision, so I tried a half-face one. After a few months I ditched that as well, though I keep it hung around my neck in case the air is still and the overpowering rotten stench builds up in the L.A. Basin. Or if I am in the middle of a head-smashing festival. Then I’ll pull it on to keep the splatter from getting into my mouth. Yech.

And then it’s off into the Wreck again, where much fun and death are to be found. For six months I’ve been doing this. Six months from the day I turned sixteen.

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