Just Another Day at the Office: A Walking Dead Short

It takes her less than a minute to cover the ground between the row of outer tents and the center of the pasture, where two dozen weaker souls are huddled among the crates and provisions stashed under the partially erected circus tent. Several vehicles have fired up, and are now pulling next to the huddling throng in clouds of carbon monoxide. Armed men on the back of a flatbed guard the women and children as Lilly ducks down behind a battered steamer trunk, her lungs heaving for air, her skin crawling with terror.

She stays like that for the duration of the attack, her hands over her ears. She doesn’t see Josh near the tree line, getting his hand around the hammer embedded in the fallen cadaver, wrenching it free at the last possible instant and swinging it toward the closest attacker. She doesn’t see the blunt end of the hammer striking the male zombie’s mandible, staving in half the rotting skull with the tremendous force of Josh’s blow. And Lilly misses the last part of the struggle; she misses the female nearly getting her black incisors around Josh’s ankle before a shovel comes down on the back of her head. Several men have reached Josh in time to dispatch the final zombie, and Josh rolls away, unharmed and yet trembling with the adrenaline and tremors of a near miss.

The entire attack—now vanquished and fading away in a soft drone of whimpering children, dripping fluids, and the escaping gases of decomposition—has encompassed less than one hundred and eighty seconds.

Later, dragging the remains off into a dry creek bed to the south, Chad and his fellow alpha dogs count twenty-four walkers in all—a totally manageable threat level…for the time being, at least.



“Jesus, Lilly, why don’t you just suck it up and go apologize to the man?” The young woman named Megan sits on a blanket outside the circus tent, staring at the untouched breakfast in front of Lilly.

The sun has just come up, pale and cold in the clear sky—another day in the tent city—and Lilly sits in front of a battered Coleman stove, sipping instant coffee from a paper cup. The congealed remnants of freeze-dried eggs sit in the camp skillet, as Lilly tries to shake the guilt-ridden ruminations of a sleepless night. In this world there is no rest for the weary or the cowardly.

All around the great and tattered circus tent—now fully assembled—the bustle of other survivors drones on, almost as if the previous day’s attack never happened. People carry folding chairs and camp tables into the great tent through the wide opening at one end (probably once the entrance for elephants and clown cars), as the tent’s outer walls palpitate with the shifting breezes and changes in air pressure. In other parts of the encampment more shelters are going up. Fathers are gathering and taking inventory of firewood, bottled water, ammunition, weapons, and canned goods. Mothers are tending to children, blankets, coats, and medicine.

Upon closer scrutiny a keen observer would see a thinly veiled layer of anxiety in every activity. But what is uncertain is which danger poses the greatest threat: the undead or the encroaching winter.

“I haven’t figured out what to say yet,” Lilly mutters finally, sipping her lukewarm coffee. Her hands haven’t stopped shaking. Eighteen hours have passed since the attack, but Lilly still stews with shame, avoiding contact with Josh, keeping to herself, convinced that he hates her for running and leaving him to die. Josh has tried to talk to her a few times but she couldn’t handle it, telling him she was sick.

“What is there to say?” Megan fishes in her denim jacket for her little one-hit pipe. She tamps a tiny bud of weed into the end and sparks it with a Bic, taking a healthy toke. An olive-skinned young woman in her late twenties with loose henna-colored curls falling around her narrow, cunning face, she blows the green smoke out with a cough. “I mean look at this dude, he’s huge.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

Megan grins. “Dude looks like he can take care of himself, is all I’m saying.”

“That has nothing to do with it.”

“Are you sleeping with him?”

“What?” Lilly looks at her friend. “Are you serious?”

“It’s a simple question.”

Lilly shakes her head, lets out a sigh. “I’m not even going to dignify that with—”

“You’re not…are you? Good-Little-Doobie-Lilly. Good to the last drop.”