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faintest hint of it. She is remembering us. The few happy moments we had. Okay, so. I am standing on a hill. I am looking at acolor I have never seen before. Ocean. I am not at a funeral. I am thinking of someone I once loved. I don’t know if I am her thinking of me, or if I am me thinking of her, her heart, my heart, aching, or its opposite, or if maybe, right at this moment, there is no difference. Okay, so. Okay, so. Okay.

First Person Shooter
    Janine is on line four.
    “There’s a finger in Housewares.”
    I don’t ask what she means, because I can’t think of anything funny to say, because I can never think of anything when I’m talking to Janine, because I’m in love with her.
    I tell her I’ll check it out and hang up the phone. The whole way over to Home and Bath, I’m just repeating to myself, under my breath, stupid stupid stupid stupid stupid dummy. The only thing that makes me feel better is that none of this really matters since I don’t have a chance in hell with her anyway.
    I hang a left at the towel racks and then a quick right and whoa, Janine was not kidding, that is definitely a finger. On the ground. In the middle of the aisle with all of the slow cookers.
    This is the graveyard shift at WorldMart. Biggest store in the human world. I work Sunday through Wednesday, and then Friday if anyone calls in sick, which, of course, is pretty much every Friday. We’re open twenty-four hours a day, three hundred sixty-five days a year, because keeping the fluorescent lights on for a decade or two until theyburn out is actually cheaper than turning them on and off, and that means for eight hours every night there are two of us in here, minding the store, which is roughly the size of three city blocks.
    I walk over to the nearest house phone and call Janine.
    “We should tell Burt,” I say. Burt is the manager. At the moment, Burt is not in the store. He’s in the parking lot, a quarter mile away, listening to Black Sabbath with the windows rolled up in a smoke-filled Pontiac Sunbird. I can smell it from here.
    “So tell him,” Janine says, and there’s something about the way she says it. It’s a dare. She’s daring me. It’s a test. She’s testing me. I start to wonder whether, despite all of the stupid things I have said to Janine, I might actually have a chance with her.
    I hang up the phone and go back to where the finger is.
    I pick it up.
    Then I feel something cold and sharp tickling the back of my neck and I almost wet myself. A small yelp escapes from my throat.
    I turn around to see Janine. I hate everything about her except for the fact that I love everything about her. I don’t think I would actually ever want to kiss her so much as I’d want to possess her. Consume her. Eat her, so that no one else could have her.
    “You should have seen your face,” she says, laughing at me, but not quite mocking me. Not quite. Is this how she flirts?
    I slip the finger into the pocket of my jacket. I don’t know why, exactly, but I don’t want her to see that I have it.
    A bunch of stuff crashes to the floor over in another section.
    “Sounds like Toiletries,” I say, and we both run toward aisle ninety-seven. We stop in Mascara, crouch down, and listen to what sounds like shuffling. Janine starts crawling toward Lipstick and I try to grab her ankle but just end up with her shoe in my hand. She looks back, catches me watching her from behind, frowns, then motions for me to follow.
    We stop at the Maybelline end cap just in time to see someone, or something, shambling toward a beef jerky sample station. Janine shrieks, and then the thing lets out a groan and then Janine and I are both up on our feet and running and we round the corner into Eyeliner and come face-to-face with it, whatever it is. Only, it’s not an it. It’s a her. A zombie. A woman. A zombie woman. She’s older than Janine, closer to my age, maybe early thirties, missing a little bit of her face, but otherwise sort of