"What the hell?" I answered, with as much dignity as I could. "Who are you?"

"I'm Kara Westrin, from St. Lawrence Catholic. I've been scouring this part of town for hours, but there's nothing but guys like him."

I noticed that she was in fact wearing some kind of uniform, what looked like blue slacks and a white polo shirt that may have inadvertently accentuated her curvature. I noticed that right away, despite myself and my less than stellar situation.

"What happened and why are there people like him?"

"Hold on, buddy. I just saved your life. What's your name and what have you been doing since the city fell apart?"

"I'm Dylan F. Edgerton, the F stands for 'fucking', like when the teachers see that I'm in their class. I guess I've been sleeping."

"Oh great. Do you always introduce yourself, 'Dylan-fucking-Edgerton'? And what do you mean, sleeping?"

"I mean I was in detention, everyone disappeared, and I just woke up a minute before you started this Columbine re-enactment on Jerry there. And…no…not really."

"Oh. I was in the drama closet back at school and left the key in the lock. When the sirens went off, someone shut the door on me. I eventually broke my way out with a bust of Pallas."

I smacked my forehead.

"How literary."

"Thanks. Anyway, my school was a lot like yours, except that a clique of girls were already zombies when I got out, and I had to get away from them, at least until I found this."

I gazed at the gun appraisingly, if not downright admiringly. It was a pretty sweet piece of iron. The way that curvy Kara held it in her hands, like an old pro, was even better.

"Who the hell, at a Catholic school, had a gun like that?"

Kara blushed a little."

"Well…me. Dad's a hunter, and we forgot to take it out of the truck after our last hunt. It was just under the seat like always. I suppose if the principal or someone had seen it, I'd have gotten in trouble, but…"

"Um, all right. So you went to school in your truck, toting a gun, and…what kind of piece is that, anyway?"

"Oh, this? Standard 12-guage pump action, manufactured by Umbrella, and they call their model the Lord of the Hunt. Corny, eh? Anyway, it's loaded with buckshot now, the better to blow you away with, my dear, but I've got a couple boxes of birdshot in the truck in case anything comes up."

"Dear God. I'm sticking with you. Do you have that truck here now?"

"Certainly, but we need a place to hole up for the night. You prolly saw it getting dark?"

"Yeah. Looks like the end of the fucking world out there."

Kara was silent at that, and my words hung in the air like one of the clouds even now covering the setting sun. She stared out at the gray, empty city through the shatterproof glass in the school doors. Finally, she turned back to me.

"Where's the most secure place in your school?"

"Well…"

Honestly, I didn't know. I was kind of a skid, and did my best to avoid any knowledge of school or its campus, even to the point of ignoring what I already knew. Finally, I just had to decide.

"I don't spend a whole lot of time around there, understand," I said, "but I hear that the band wing is like a fortress. It's either that or the guys' locker rooms."

"Ugh. Let's try the band stronghold."

I led her down that way, past the empty gyms with the slowly swaying basketball nets, down through lonely classrooms and places that might never see a human being again, all of them crying out for one last mortal breath, pleading with us to stay with them, until they rocked us to sleep and died alongside their makers. We went to the actual rehearsal room first, but there were two exits and a window (not to mention that all those silent music stands gave us the creeps), so we went next to the percussion room. This was better, since the only entrance was a heavy metal door with a shatterproof sheet of glass in it that served for a window. The rest of the room was painted a silvery blue, and bits of pro-band propaganda hung from the walls, little regional championships and cutouts from the Raccoon Times that featured one drummer or another. We shoved a huge concert bass drum up against the window- we didn't yet know if the zombies could see us or would notice us through the glass- and tried to make ourselves comfortable.

Neither of us wanted to leave there after we'd gotten so safely in, so we didn't go out for food or blankets. Instead, we emptied the other bass drums of the old sweatshirts that served as a muffle and made ourselves a nest. I toyed around with different instruments for part of the next nine hours, until I knocked over a cymbal rack with a tremendous crash and Kara yelled at me to stop fuckin' around. We heard shuffling go past the room about five minutes after the crash, and then heard another shuffle going in the opposite direction, but after that it was quiet all night. I offered to take the first watch, but Kara gave me a suspicious look.

"You ever fired one of these?" she asked, hefting the shotgun in one hand and patting the pump with the other.

"Not one of those. I play paintball all the time, though," I said.

Kara lifted her nose a little, and sniffed. It's an understatement to say that the percussion room reeked of disdain…and old sweat.

"Paintball guns have no recoil at all. If you aim like you would on one of those pea-shooters, you'll probably blow the ceiling up, unless you're aiming at your feet. Also, you can't hold the gun the same. You need to be firm with it, 'cause it'll kick. I know paintball guns are pretty much a point-and-click interface, but you have to control a real gun."

"I think I can handle it, Kara. We're in a freaking safe; I won't even need it. If it's that bad, you'll probably either be awake anyway, or dead."

"How tactful. You can have the first watch, but I'll be up for awhile anyway. We might as well talk for the time, since we seem to be the last people alive in this forsaken city."

After she said this, Kara's face took on a funny expression. It's hard to describe accurately, but it looked as if she was blending thoughtfulness and melancholy. Her eyes didn't focus on anything really, except maybe the floor. The little muscles in her temples shifted restlessly, and she kept chewing on the inside of her bottom lip. The ridiculous little palm tree ponytail bobbed and swayed with her minute movements.

"Hey, Kara?"

She looked up at me, but her eyes still seemed to be struggling to focus.

"Mmm?"

"What are you thinking? There's something big going on in there."

"Oh…" She looked startled. "Um, I was thinking about this zombie thing. We don't know what started it, or if there are survivors. If there are, how many? Is the whole world like this, or just Raccoon City?"

I looked up, at the bass drum covering our only view of the outside.

"I don't know, Kara. I know even less than you. I was asleep."

I paused for a moment, and then plowed ahead when it because apparent that asking the questions I had to wouldn't matter if we were the only humans left in the world: there would be no one to care.

"Are they really zombies, like in the movies? Or are they people?"

"I don't know, Dylan, but I hope to God that they're really dead. I heard someone shouting, while I waited in that dark closet, and I thought they said that it was a disease. You catch it from either contact or blood, I don't know. No one could decide. But if its curable…I couldn't say. It doesn't look like it."

"Do you have a boyfriend, Kara?"

This time, that look of unfocus sharpened into a deadly point.

"What? Why?"

"I don't know, Kara, we're the last humans on earth. I was curious."

"No, Dylan, I don't have a boyfriend."

I waited for a moment more, then asked the biggest one.

"Did he die today, Kara? Did you kill him?"

Kara burst into tears, lay her head on my shoulder and nodded against my neck. Her crystal-drop tears melted into my wrinkled black Offspring t-shirt that hadn't been washed in three days of wear. She cried and nodded, and I gently touched her shoulder, and she put her arm around me, and finally she cried herself to sleep in the pile of sweatshirts next to me, and then I fell asleep, and first watch be damned.