In the moment before Sam Yao died, his brain provided him with a highlight reel of everything he survived before. Every close call, every time he barely scraped past with his life. When he hesitated a little too long faced with his parents, holding his sister's hockey stick but unwilling to use it, and his mum got so close her fingernails left long red marks on his arm that didn't fade for days. When he encountered his first swarm and stumbled on one of the cracks in the pavement. When the Major saved him, swooping in like one of his comic book super heroes. And the silly ones, too. When he almost fell in the shower the week before. When Rajit tried to cook him something and the smell made him nauseous before he even considered eating it.
It was a list of only-just-successes, because every breath you took after the end of the world was one you'd earned, the most recent in a list of moments you had managed to live. This moment was Sam Yao's last.
He was at the comms desk. There was nowhere else to go - nowhere was safe, the walls had fallen, and he could at least try to save some of the runners out in the field. Perhaps, he even hoped, he would survive too – he'd barricaded the door, but the comms shack had never been a very stable structure. But maybe the zombies wouldn't notice him.
They did, of course. They noticed and he couldn't keep the terror out of his voice when he heard the banging start, the insistent thump of single-minded zoms trying to force their way in. The runner had asked him what was wrong and he hadn't been able to answer, he just kept trying to direct them. That was his job. He didn't know who was dead already – he had seen Janine go down just before he'd barricaded the door, but Maxine, Jack, Eugene? He knew nothing outside of his tin shack, but he could hear the screams.
When the zombies came in, there was nothing he could do. He had a rounders bat, but he couldn't swing it far in the confined space and the zombies kept coming. He heard someone at the other end of his headset shouting his name, but he couldn't answer.
As he killed a zombie on his left, another went for his throat on his right, and there were too many bodies for him to even try to move. He yelled, but it was cut short by the zombie's jaw closing in on his Adam's apple, ripping his neck apart.
He died again three days later, when Runner Five returned to base. A single shot to the head. His headset had still been on, and she had heard the groaning the whole time.