29

After all the zombies came out of the ground in northern Canada, it was only a matter of time before American life changed drastically. My mother insisted that I do my best not to worry until my high school closed. Then, when I no longer had any education to worry about, she gave me a gun and told me to learn how to use it. And so I learned how to use several types of guns. And I gave up my dream of being a doctor because medical school was one of the riskiest places on the planet, what with all the dead bodies. I became a semi-professional zombie hunter, semi because there wasn't a lot of money to be won in that particular field.

There was an entire team of us, hopeless thrill-seekers who loved nothing better than danger they controlled. It was like the roller coasters we rode as children. There was nothing more satisfying than killing something that lived only by the carnal urge to kill others. In short, the whole thing was really awesome and a whole hell of a lot more fun than being a doctor. Most of what doctors did nowadays was kill living humans who had been infected, and that was just depressing.



Derek swabbed a cut on my cheek with a low-molarity hydrochloric acid. I had been cut at the hand of a zombie and god only knew what the bastard had done to the knife before sticking it in my face. I had a hunch that there was something that hurt less effective in killing disgusting zombie germs, but better a small scar than to spend the next six months rotting from the inside out.

"Hurt too much?" he asked. Derek was always the most sympathetic, the most delicate. Somehow his ministrations always left the smallest scars. Sometimes when things were scary, he would sit close to me wherever we were staying and admit that he was afraid. I liked making him feel better, just not quite as much as I liked killing dead things. He was probably too sensitive for this job, to be honest. He read poetry in his spare time.

I shrugged. "I've had worse." I had. I was missing the ring finger on my left hand. I might have been disappointed if my career choice had made marriage feasible. As things stood, it was just an occupational hazard. I had given up on being pretty years ago. Past my high school years, concern for beauty had been lost underneath the almost wild desire not to die a most agonizing death.