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pretty in a melancholy way.
    “She looks nervous,” I say to Janine, but Janine’s gone, flat-out sprinting, screaming all the way to Power Tools.
    Pretty Zombie Lady holds up two different tubes of lipstick, one bloodred and one that’s more of an earth tone, and then I understand. She wants my opinion. I step back, look at her skin—which I guess is sort of a grayish baloney color—and point to the earth-toned tube.
    “Matches your blouse better,” I say.
    She’s holding the lipstick in her right hand, which has a hole where the ring finger should be.
    I pull her digit out of my pocket and offer it to her.
    She takes it and jams it into the hole where it used to be, and then sort of nods as if to say thanks.
    She starts to creep over toward Accessories.
    We shop for a while together like this. She picks out a couple of options, I give her my choice. Sometimes she goes with it, but a couple of times she goes the other way. At one point she stops in front of a mirror and looks at herself and I’m looking at her look at herself, wondering what is she thinking, and we lock eyes, we’re making eye contact with each other in our reflections in the mirror. She’s clearly thinking about someone. Me? No. This is crazy. But is it? I don’t know. I don’t know anything. I didn’t even think zombies could think. And I’m thinking maybe she’s not thinking, maybe she’s under the control of someone else. Maybe I am, too.
    Pretty Zombie Lady moves slow, and by the time she manages to pull together a decent-looking outfit, it’s a quarter past two. Just as I realize that I haven’t seen Janine in half an hour, I hear her voice booming over the PA system.
    “I’m in Firearms,” she says. “Stay low.”
    I pick up the nearest phone.
    “She’s not going to hurt us,” I say, my own voice carrying out across the cavernous store. I just hope zombie girl understands me.
    “What are you talking about?” Janine says. “She’s going to eat us. She’s going to eat our brains.”
    “No, I don’t think so. That’s not what she’s doing here.”
    “Then what is she doing here?”
    “Um,” I say. “I think she’s getting ready for a date.”
    Before Janine has time to process that, I look up and see Pretty Zombie Lady’s face on the giant HD screen hanging over Home Entertainment.
    “Huh,” I say, watching her try to figure out the camcorder.
    “What?”
    “Gotta go.”
    Janine can hear in my voice that something’s very wrong. “What’s happening?” she says.
    “Our friend just discovered
House of the Dead Two
.”
    I approach carefully, stop a few feet behind her. We both stand there watching the demo for a while, limbs being blown off, exploding heads, and when she turns around I see that, in her blank-eyed kind of way, she looks hurt. Betrayed.
    Janine comes marching down the aisle with a hand cannon. Her skinny arm can barely keep it level. She’s got it pointed at Pretty Zombie Lady, right at her head. The zombie just looks at Janine, unblinking, almost as if she wants to get her head blown off. Which, I suppose, is understandable. She started off tonight excited for a date, and then she comes in here and sees this game, and now who knows what’s happened to her self-image, to her picture of the world. Is there such a thing as a self-aware zombie? Can a zombie realize what she is? Maybe there are degrees of zombification, and she’s not quite all the way there yet. Maybe I’m partway there myself.
    I put my hand on top of Janine’s and slowly lower thegun. Her hand is warm and full of blood and I should be excited to be touching Janine but instead I’m worried about Zombie Lady. She scratches her finger nervously until it falls off again and hits the ground. We all look down at it.
    The
House of the Dead
demo is starting over. A bunch of zombie heads explode on-screen. Janine’s still got the gun in her hand. I’m trying to figure out if this is the best day of work ever, or the worst. Why