A little taste of Zumanity

Chapter One
Shop Til You Drop (Dead)

The ruins of my favorite shopping mall were littered with the skulls and spines of people I had probably known at one point. I adjusted the strap on my shoulder, and shimmed along the railing of the escalator. Once I had tried to sprint up it, but the mechanism holding it in place had long since rotted away, so I ended up with a group of the undead looking for more than Old Navy.

I stopped atop the escalator, making sure that nothing was stumbling about. It was a rare site to see a zombie by the candy store or the phone kiosk, but that was the kinds of place they always seemed to be. This particular time, there turned out to be no one around. Caution was my middle name, not that the joke would make anyone laugh. When was the last time I met someone? How long had the apocalypse been going?

Based on the Hot Topic merchandise, it could have been 1999, but that was impossible. I’d been on my own since the very beginning. I didn't want to be alone, but every group I became a part of made me feel very uncomfortable about being made of skin and having a nice rifle. The rifle’s name was Madeline, but I had no idea what she actually was. She had a scope, but I had no idea whether that was a prerequisite for a sniper rifle. In the distance, I heard a low mumble of a dead shopper. I slid toward a section of the railing that kept me hidden from the thing downstairs. The rifle, an extension of my arm, instinctively went to the edge of the floor. The tripod snapped open on its own and I placed the scope to my eye. How many bullets were left? Six? I had an old-fashioned six shooter, in the post-apocalyptic west.

I didn’t have enough bullets to waste, so I lined the shot and pupped the cap off of the zombie’s head. I couldn’t have been more wrong about all those hunting trips I never wanted to go on. If I hadn’t been dragged around to different hunting expositions, I’d have been dead in the water long ago.