
Mandy Banks was either 19 or 34 years old, depending how you looked at it. She and her older brother Richard had run a gas station together along a road high in the mountains. They never did a whole lot of business due to their remote location, but it had been enough to pay the bills.
One afternoon fifteen years ago, Richard drove to the nearest town to buy supplies, leaving Mandy to mind the station. A couple of hours later, she saw his pickup truck coming fast back up the road. The truck skidded to a stop on the gravel out front of the gas pumps. The driver-side door swung open and Richard piled out. He was holding his hand over the side of his head. Blood ran thick between his fingers and was all over the collar and shoulder of his shirt.
"My God, Richard! What happened to you?" Mandy said.
"The whole town has gone nuts," Richard said. "People were just attacking each other on the street. And remember Mrs. Berryhill, your old piano teacher? She came out of nowhere and tackled me. Took damn near half my ear off with her teeth."
Mandy helped her brother into the office where they kept the first-aid kit. As she cleaned and dressed his wound, she said she should take him to see a doctor. He said the nearest doctor was in town and there was no way he was going back there until things calmed down.
That evening at the dinner table, Richard began to feel ill. He held his arms around his sides and shivered. When Mandy put her hand against his forehead, there was no sign of fever. If anything, he was cold to the touch.
She put him to bed and stayed with him until he fell asleep. He didn't look good. Town full of crazies or no, she swore to herself that she would take him to see a doctor the next day.
When Mandy went to check on Richard in the morning, he was dead. She dropped to her knees, took his hand in hers, and sobbed. She knelt by his side and cried for a long time, blaming herself for not getting him medical attention right away.
Then Richard's eyes opened and he bit her on the arm.
The bite was deep enough to break the skin and draw blood.
"Damn it, Richard. That hurt," she said.
She expected an apology from him but he didn't say anything. He just stared at her with eyes that didn't know her anymore. He reached with one of his hands and tried to grab her. She batted it out of the way. He then lunged at her with both hands but she dodged his attack and ran out of the bedroom.
She kept moving until she was out of the house and on the path back toward the gas station. He looked over over her shoulder and saw Richard standing in in the doorway, drool running down his chin and that same empty look in his eyes.
Her first thought was to drive away in the pickup truck but the keys were in the house, with him. Mandy was a good runner so her next plan was to head down the road on foot as quickly as she could and flag down the first car that came along.
As she ran along the side of the road, her heart pounded and blood pulsed through her veins. The cold numbness of the bite wound on her arm quickly began to spread and her entire body started to shiver. She felt exhausted, more so than she ever had in her life. Mandy stumbled a few more steps then leaned against a tree and slid to the ground.
By the time the first car appeared, she lay there out of its view and unconscious.
That afternoon, she got up and walked back to the gas station. The car that had passed her was parked in front of one of the pumps. There was the sound of an infant crying in the back seat. The driver of the car, a woman in her thirties lay on the gravel with her throat ripped away. Richard crouched next to her. He had managed to tear open her abdominal cavity and was greedily shoving sections of small intestine into his mouth.
When he heard his sister's feet scuff along the gravel, he looked up at her for a moment and then resumed his meal. Mandy paid even less attention to him. She walked to the car and opened the back door. The baby's crying stopped and Mandy had herself a late lunch.
The plague that had turned Mandy and Richard into zombie cannibals was ravaging much of the country. This led to a war between the living, who wished to remain that way, and the living dead, who kept trying to eat the living.
The battles continued for years. The living soon found themselves to be a dwindling minority as people reluctant to shoot their zombie loved ones in the head were either devoured or infected and turned into zombies themselves.
In the end though, the army of the living prevailed. Once people became accustomed to the idea that butting a bullet between your mother's eyes did not necessarily make you a bad person, the zombies never had a chance. After that, it came down to a contest between gnashing teeth and firearms. Countless species on the planet had already learned the painful lesson that it is really no contest at all.
Humanity, with their survival assured, then set about the tasks of putting corpses to the torch and building their world anew.
Mandy and Richard missed most of the excitement because the war never came to them. They fed on wild game and the occasion outdoorsman or stranded motorist, letting one day drift into the next without a care in the world.
They lived (or rather, dwelled) at the gas station for over a decade, making forays into the wilderness periodically in search of food. This went on until one evening when Richard was struck by lightning while chasing a raccoon across an open field. He was filthy with motor oil from clumsily tripping and knocking over drums of the stuff back at the station so when the lightning bolt hit him, he went up like a torch. He took two steps and then collapsed face forward, the flames coming off him licking the night sky.
Mandy was standing no more than 20 feet from her brother when this happened.
"Hnnngggh, mnnngggh," she said, expressing a disdain for fire common among zombies and wandered off to start her solo career.
The next five years were as uneventful for Mandy as the previous ten. The only real difference was that the decline in numbers of the human population had brought the availability of their meat down to almost zero. Mandy fed on possum, skunk, whatever else she could get her hands on and did so willingly, albeit with less enthusiasm than when she had the chance to bite into a hiking-firmed buttock of a Sierra Clubber.
Then one day, Mandy was walking along trail in a wooded area and saw a human arm hanging on a rope from a tree branch overhead. She salivated, let out a little hiss, and marched toward the severed limb.
When her hand grasped the arm, she triggered a trap. She was hauled up in a net made from thick nylon mesh. Mandy thrashed about but was unable to free herself.
Two men approached. They smelled of beer and being alive.
"Carl, I think we just recuped our expenses for gas and that arm," said one of them.
Mandy continued to writhe and strain against the nylon.
"Yeah we did," said Carl. "She's got plenty of fight in her. I bet our man'll like that."
"As long as she doesn't have too much fight."
"She could be Lucy fucking Liu and it won't matter one goddamn bit. Come on, Dan. Let's cut this bitch down and throw her ass in the truck."
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