ZOMBIE BOOKS

at me.
“This is Kid,” Molly replies firmly.  “He’s staying with us now, aren’t you?”
“Uh… yeah,” I say weakly.
Peter leans back in his chair and crosses his arms over his chest.  “Huh,” is all the man says at first.  After a moment of studying me, he finally says, “I’m Peter, this is Wood.”  He gestures at his poker opponent, who gives me an expressionless gaze.  “You’ve met Dave, Duck, and our beloved Molly.”   He cocks his head to the side and frowns at me a little.  “So, Kid, where you from?”
“My name’s not Kid, okay?”
“Mine’s not Peter, and he’s not Duck,” he replies mysteriously.  “When our old lives passed away, so did our old names.  We gave each other new names, and yours is Kid.”  He pointed around the room as he continued.  “The weirdo in the cowboy hat loved to hunt Duck. So now he’s Duck. Wood here was a carpenter’s apprentice. I drove truck.”
“And I’m the friggin’ molly maid,” Molly announced sarcastically.
“But your name is Peter?” I ask, still a little baffled.
“As in Peterbilt,” he explained.   “And Dave here,” he continued, “well he hasn’t said a damn thing since getting here.  Found him in an awful state, though he does love smashin’ zombies.”
“I promised Kid some grub,” Duck interjects.  My stomach again lurches at the thought.
“Sissy’s in the kitchen workin’ on some soup.”  Peter smiles and nods at the corner door.  “Why don’t you show our new roommate the way, Duck?”
“C’mon, Kid.”  Duck leads me to the door and into another hallway.
“Tell him not to use the shitter,” Peter calls before the door closes behind us.
“Water’s kinda limited right now,” Duck explains.  “So if you gotta piss, do it outside.  You learn to crap only when you have to.”
“You go outside, unprotected?”
“Not really.  See there’s this window in an office off the kitchen,” he says with an embarrassed grin.  “You just stand there to whiz out of it,” he explains as we make our way down the hall, “but you’ve got to hang your ass out if you need to crap.  And don’t get any on the walls, either,” he adds quickly.  “Pisses Wood off somethin’ fierce if there’s scat anywhere near the sill.”
“Makes sense,” I say, imagining hanging onto a window ledge and bombing the bushes hundreds of feet below.
“Shoot,” Duck giggled, “I once pissed out that window and the wind picked up suddenly.”  He shook his head at the memory.  “Like walkin’ through a sprinkler, that was.  I had piss sprayed up and down my whole body.”
I tried not to picture it as we walked through a glass door and into a kitchenette.  There was a small table covered in Formica with a chrome border.  A fridge.  A microwave.  A sink.  A stove.  And at the stove was a slender young lady in a tank top and a ponytail.
All of my previous expectations came flooding back.
“Sissy,” Duck says as we enter the room.  “This is Kid.”
Sissy turns around and I am immediately blown away.  She has to be nineteen or twenty, with big eyes and an agile frame.  Suddenly the name “Kid” seemed highly inappropriate.
“Kyle,” I blurt.  “My names Kyle.  I’m uh… I’m not a kid.  It’s just some dumb name that Molly lady gave me.  It’s stupid really.  ‘Cause I’m clearly not a kid.  She’s just… I don’t know… But she doesn’t know me and she isn’t very creative I guess.”
“It’s bad luck to use your old name,” she says without expression, “and bad form to talk like that about my mother, Kid.”
Damn.
“Oh!  I’m sorry!  I didn’t know you were family,” I say hurriedly.
“Didn’t I tell you, Kid?” Duck adds, “We’re all family here.”
“But she really is my mother,” Sissy clarifies.  “Since before all this.  Now she’s like a den mother to us.  Peter is like the father, Wood is the angry cousin, Dave and Duck are my strange uncles.”
“Guess that makes you the little brother, ay Kid?”
“No!” I start, louder than I should have.
“How old are you anyways?” she asks.
“Eighteen,” I say, and immediately regret not lying.
Sissy laughs and says, “I think you would prefer Kid to Little Brother.”
“How old are you?” I ask eagerly.
“Twenty-two,” she says.
Not completely out of reach.
She turns back to the stove and her pot of soup.  The smell is rich with vegetables and the consistency makes the meal look like stew.
“Smells good,” I say, salivating.
“Duck,” Sissy starts, “get Kid some crackers or something before he eats the spoon out of my hand.”
“And I bet he would too,” the man says with a wink at me.
“How’d you get the name Sissy?” I ask.  Right away I realize my tone was too bold.
“My mother used to call me that, before.”  She never looks up from her dinner, but I don’t need to see her face.  I know her expression by the sound of her voice.
“I lost my parents and my brother,” I share.
She turns and looks at me, redness swelling around her eyes.  These were tears that had come often, and her eyes were well-practiced at this dance.  She looks at me wordlessly, lips pressed firm and tears welling.  Without a sound she turns back to the stove.
Hide behind nicknames all you want, guys.  There is no hiding from what is now the world.  Looking at Duck and his saddened expression, I know the truth:  We have all lost someone.
And you don’t get the name Sissy for nothing.
◊◊◊
Over the course of the next few weeks, Duck, Peter, Wood, and Dave taught me how to kill a zombie.
In a word: Destruction.
You can shoot a zombie all you want, but the virus apparently works as an animating factor throughout the body.  The brain is useless according to Peter and Duck, who have tried countless ways to kill a zombie with a blow to the head.
Bullets.  Shotgun shells.  Blunt force.  Decapitation.  None of these will stop a zombie.  The only answer they could find was its complete annihilation.  Smash every bit of the zombie you can.  The gorier the better.
“Take’ em out at the knees